I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: very little good comes when people working together engage in sexual relationships.

Yes, I’ve heard people prattle on about how it’s unrealistic to think that people won’t get involved with others they work with given how much time they spend on the job. And yes, I also know that just about everyone can point to an office romance that ended up in marriage and true love.

Those things DO happen and I have seen them too, but in my long experience as a boss and manager, the office romances that ended well are few and far between. In fact, I can count the ones that worked out on the fingers of one hand.

The trends may show that office relationships are on the rise, but I still stand by what I’ve always said—office relationships are a bad idea. And, there’s a simple reason why: It’s because they go bad all too often , and when they do, the spoiled romance leaves the participants—and the co-workers around them, who have to live with the bitter, sometimes litigious aftermath—much worse off.

It was just a few weeks ago when we were treated to late-night talk show host David Letterman’s account of how his sleeping with co-workers made him the target of an extortion attempt, and now we have another one with a fairly prominent television personality that has a Fatal Attraction spin to it.

“ESPN [baseball] analyst Steve Phillips had a fling with a 22-year-old production assistant,” according to the New York Post, “who, after being dumped, taunted his wife with ‘Fatal Attraction’-like phone calls and a letter that bragged about her sexcapades with Phillips while taking pot shots at their ‘loveless marriage.’ ”

Phillips is a former general manager of the New York Mets who, according to the Post, “admitted having multiple affairs with women while working for the Mets.” Yes, he’s got a track record for fishing in the company pond, and it caused him problems back when he was a baseball executive too.

The current “developments come 11 years after Phillips took a brief leave of absence as the Mets’ GM after admitting to having sex with a team employee, Rosa Rodriguez, who sued him for sexual harassment, a case later settled out of court.”

I won’t go into the details of Phillips’ latest workplace sex scandal (the New York Post does a great job of that), but in the end, it not only got Phillips suspended for a week by ESPN, but he “is now being sued for divorce by his 40-year-old wife, the mother of his four sons,” the newspaper added. In addition, Phillips has deeded the family’s five-bedroom, multimillion-dollar home to his wife as well.

How many stories like the ones surrounding Steve Phillips and David Letterman do we have to hear before the light bulb goes on and people realize that sexual relationships with co-workers are fraught with peril and not worth the trouble and collateral damage they can cause for the rest of the workplace, and the families on the outside too?

And here’s the irony in all of this: You don’t get to be a Major League Baseball general manager, or network analyst, or famous late-night talk show host, unless you have a lot of skill and talent. Both Phillips and Letterman are smart guys who, somehow, outsmarted themselves and ended up doing some dumb things.

They aren’t the first to do this, of course, and they won’t be the last to see the consequences when an office affair goes bad. They’re also living proof of an old workplace truism that bears repeating, and remembering: The smarter you are, the dumber you’ll seem when you do something foolish.

And getting involved sexually with people you work with is about as foolish, dumb and self-destructive as it gets.

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