I’m not one of those “I told you so” guys, or the kind of person who would crow about being right all the time, and that’s doubly true when comes to being right about something I would much rather prefer to be wrong about. That’s how I’m feeling today about Circuit City.

Today, the country’s second-largest electronics retailer announced that “it will immediately close and liquidate 155 stores and lay off thousands of employees as it struggles to survive an increasingly dreary holiday shopping season,” according to a story in The Wall Street Journal.

The company is not going away, of course (at least not yet), but it also said it “planned to reduce about 17 percent of its domestic work force, and slash operating, payroll and marketing expenses. Circuit City currently operates 721 stores and outlets in the U.S. as well as 770 mostly smaller locations in Canada, and employs roughly 55,000 workers including holiday help.”

I don’t think I am going out on a limb saying this, but today’s decision by Circuit City is just another step in the road to shutting down the company, to ultimately filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and liquidation.

The PR minions at Circuit City will undoubtedly be doing their best to spin this as a positive move, but really, how can closing 155 stores heading into the busy (and critical) holiday season be seen as anything except a desperation move to buy time and put off the ultimate, final decision?

The sad thing is that it didn’t need to be this way. Yes, there are a lot of negative market factors that come into play here, but Circuit City’s problems are primarily due to a terribly shortsighted management decision from an idiot CEO who put into place a lose-lose workforce strategy.

Former CEO Philip Schoonover thought it was a winning strategy to get rid of his best and most experienced people, simply because veteran workers were paid better than new, green employees. It wasn’t; it left Circuit City with a demoralized, inexperienced workforce and hurt the company’s competitiveness in relation to industry leader Best Buy.

 As one comment to the Wall Street Journal story put it: “It’s tough to sell anything when you don’t have salespeople. Maybe that explains why much of my possible CC purchases are bought online from online retailers. We’ll see CC in Chapter 11 or 7. They’ve earned it!”

Schoonover’s decision will be the fodder for many a business-school class, because it is the classic strategic business decision that made no sense at the time and seems to have accelerated the company’s free fall, rather than set it on a strong new course. It’s also why I awarded Schoonover and Circuit City my first annual Workforce Management Stupidus Maximus Award “for the most ignorant, shortsighted and dumb workforce management practice of the year.”

Schoonover’s bad decision also led to his demise and departure as CEO of Circuit City, but it was probably too little and too late to stop the free fall the electronics retailer is now experiencing.

This is a classic case of bad management driving a company into the ground—by former CEO Schoonover, who made a truly stupid decision that belittled and demoralized his workforce, and by the Circuit City board of directors, which let him do it.

If Circuit City ultimately falls, which is something I see happening in the near future, it will be self-inflicted. Death by management, if you will. Even then, I promise to refrain from saying that “I told you so.”