I’ve asked this question before, but it bears repeating: What do you do when the big boss has a big mouth? Is there anyone in the organization who can tell bosses they’re out of line, out of bounds and need to just put a cap on it? This is a question that is probably bouncing around the boardroom of Whole Foods Markets, now that CEO John Mackey has decided to take up blogging again.

In case you missed it, Mackey has some history as a blogger that should make his board members shudder. As I said in that blog post, he put his company’s $565 million acquisition of rival Wild Oats at risk by anonymously attacking and belittling Wild Oats and its CEO on Internet financial forums. Writing under the handle “Rahodeb,” Mackey also anonymously questioned why anyone would buy Wild Oats stock and that the company was probably headed for bankruptcy—just before Whole Foods made its buyout bid.

Mackey fessed up to his indiscretion, and the Whole Foods board took some minor action, but basically, he got away with his bad behavior because, well, he’s the boss. As I noted at the time, Lynn Turner, former chief accountant for the Securities and Exchange Commission, hit the nail on the head when he told The Denver Post: “If it was any other employee of the company, he would be fired. The board should fire him.”

Well, the Whole Foods board didn’t fire him, of course, and as The Wall Street Journal points out, “the SEC spent the past 11 months investigating whether Mackey`s 1,400-odd anonymous messages … had broken any laws, but concluded no action needed to be taken against the chief executive or the company.”

So now that he’s been cleared—or more accurately, dodged a bullet—CEO Mackey has “returned to the Web with a vengeance,” according to the Journal, “posting a 2,037-word piece on the Whole Foods’ Web site in which he says he`s sorry the investigation put a negative spotlight on the company. The CEO acknowledges a mistake in judgment, but not ethics, saying he didn’t realize posting under a screen name in an online community would cause so much controversy.”

You can find Mackey’s blog on the Whole Foods Web site, and probably the best thing you can say about it is that it isn’t anonymous anymore. Other than that, what jumps out at me from Mackey’s latest blog post is that he is a delusional apologist for his own bad behavior. But even more amazing is when he writes this: “My mistake here was one of judgment—not ethics. I didn’t realize posting under a screen name in an online community such as Yahoo would be so controversial and would cause so many people to be upset. That was a mistake in judgment on my part and one that I deeply regret because it caused so much negative media attention about me and Whole Foods Market.”

In other words, Mackey says his ethics are good but his judgment bad. Maybe it’s just me and my peculiar way of looking at things, but isn’t good judgment one of the key qualities essential for a CEO running a business? And, isn’t it laughable for Mackey to claim that he didn’t know that blogging anonymously—and anonymously belittling a competitor he was trying to acquire—might be an issue?

As Barron’s pointed out, “the chief executive of Whole Foods has resumed his controversial practice of communicating with investors via the Web. But it hasn’t done anything to lift the pitiful stock from its year-long slump.” If I were Mackey, I’d be more concerned with the stock price instead of the gibberish he’s putting in his blog.

And if I were a Whole Foods investor, I’d seriously reconsider my investment, because if anything is clear, it’s this: Any company with a CEO with such terrible judgment, who doesn’t know when to shut up, is not a company I’d be comfortable keeping my money in.