Just what does it take for a CEO to get fired for cause? This week, Home Box Office chairman and CEO Chris Albrecht provided the answer.

Albrecht worked for HBO for 22 years and had been CEO of the network for the past five. He’s credited for helping create such blockbuster shows as “The Sopranos” and “Sex in the City.” Along the way, the popular network became a hugely profitable unit in the Time Warner empire, making about $1.2 billion per year and setting the standard for creativity and quality in the television industry.

But Albrecht had a dark side—an alcohol problem that he had battled for a number of years. Last weekend, the dark side consumed him. According to a Los Angeles Times report, “[Las Vegas Police] Officers at the site of the Oscar De La Hoya-Floyd Mayweather Jr. boxing match came running when they spotted a man later identified as Albrecht grabbing a woman by the throat with both hands and dragging her toward the valet parking station at the MGM Grand. Police said Albrecht was unsteady on his feet, reeked of alcohol and said of the woman ‘She pissed me off.’ ”

Albrecht was arrested and spent the night in jail. He admitted to a drinking problem and that he would take a leave of absence. When the Times reported that HBO had paid a settlement of $400,000 to $500,000 in 1991 over another Albrecht choking incident (with a married senior vice president who worked for him, and that he previously had a relationship with), the company fired him.

If you enjoy HBO—probably the best of all the cable networks—you have to be troubled by Albrecht’s sad fall. But others could se this coming. As the Times pointed out, Albrecht was well known to many as a “creative genius given to emotional tirades.”

The thing that bothers me is that Albrecht should have gotten his walking papers in 1991, when HBO had to pay the better part of a half-million dollars to cover up his first choking incident. And I wonder: How many other managers would have kept their jobs if their employer had to pony up a chunk of money to settle inappropriate behavior on the job?

You know the answer to that. We seem to live in a world where companies lavish riches on CEOs and kit them out with golden parachutes even when they don’t perform. But Chris Albrecht is proof that even there, in the rarefied realm of the CEO, sometimes enough is enough.