If you have ever been around a “star” employee, you know one thing for sure: They are almost always a royal pain in the ass.

 Almost every workforce has at least one such person, sometimes more. They almost always get special pay, privileges and kid-glove treatment from management, no matter what they do. Sometimes, star employees become star employees because they are very, very good at something, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes they are simply people brought in from somewhere else where they were rising stars, but who fail to make the leap to superstar status when they land in the new job.

The problem with star employees is that even when they truly are stars and are very, very good at what they do, having them around breeds a fair amount of discontent. That’s generally because the same qualities that drive someone to become a star are the qualities that make them hard for other people to work with: a gigantic ego, chronic selfishness, a sense of entitlement and an overwhelming disregard for anyone working around them.

My experience has been that star employees invariably wear out their welcome, but that most organizations don’t know how to get rid of them or what to say when they finally do depart. And that’s why the departure this week of superstar sports columnist Jay Mariotti from the Chicago Sun-Times is such an interesting object lesson.

Mariotti is not only a big-deal columnist at Chicago’s second-largest newspaper, but he is also known for his many appearances on ESPN’s Around the Horn and other shows. Mariotti has also been a lightning rod for criticism that gets a lot of people talking. As media columnist Phil Rosenthal at the rival Chicago Tribune put it, “In fact, he might have been more discussed than actually read. But he nonetheless became so much a part of the Sun-Times brand that the cash-strapped paper always felt compelled to re-sign him.”

In other words, the paper might have needed him more than he needed the paper (never good), prompting it to pay him big bucks even as it was slashing every other part of its operation.

Well, this week Mariotti returned from Beijing, where he had been covering the Olympics, and promptly quit. It gets better: He did it first on television and only told his newspaper bosses after they had heard about it elsewhere. And then he took a few shots at the paper’s lack of a strong Internet presence on his way out the door.

At most places I have worked, the top executives would have reacted in one of two ways—and sometimes both. 1) They would be publicly sad and dismayed to be losing such a critical part of the franchise. 2) They would be secretly dancing on their desks, glad to be rid of such a huge drain on resources. Either way, they would normally say the right things in public and wish the departing star all the best in his future endeavors.

Well, that’s where this story takes a sharp right-hand turn. Mariotti’s departure became an occasion for Sun-Times executives to mock him and crow about how happy they were that he was heading out the door.

They even pulled another Sun-Times superstar into the fray—the ailing Roger Ebert—and had him take some very public shots at Mariotti for the “ugly way” he left the newspaper. And the Sun-Times used Mariotti’s leaving as a way to market to readers (or former readers) who didn’t like him.

Here’s a question to ask yourself: What does it say about an organization that pays someone a superstar salary for 17 years, then trashes his (and by extension, its own) reputation when he decides to leave? This is a curious way to treat the office superstar, but it’s par for the course given the terrible and shortsighted management going on at America’s newspapers these days.