Charlie Sheen is nuts. And he knows how to make a complete ass of himself.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone considering the actor’s less-than-exemplary history of personal scandal. Sheen’s name has been connected with scandal for the past 20 years in everything from shooting his then-fiancé Kelly Preston in the arm in 1990 to overdosing on cocaine in 1998. He has been involved in very public splits, one with ex-wife Denise Richards in 2005 and another with estranged wife (divorce pending) Brooke Mueller last year.

Yet, with all this public controversy and the declining popularity that you think would’ve come from it, Sheen managed to remain the star of television’s most popular sitcom, Two and a Half Men, raking in 14 million viewers and making roughly $2 million per episode. That is, until recently.

With the amount of money that Sheen was bringing in to CBS, CBS’s breaking point was (apparently) very high.

Until this year, Sheen had proved the exception to the rule that Hollywood scandal would torpedo an actor’s career. Celebrities like Mel Gibson and Lindsay Lohan have yet to recover from their various scandals, and while racist remarks and repeated incidents of theft and DUI are properly condemned in the social conscience, they are hardly more severe than the various allegations of violence against women and drug abuse that Sheen has perpetrated over the years.

However, unlike Gibson and Lohan, Sheen has had a successful career despite his personal follies, as if the viewing public simply didn’t care what he did and saw him as exempt from the personal standards they hold other celebrities to. This public exemption led to Sheen being not only one of the most successful TV actors working today, but the most successful actor working in television.

Sheen, the son of iconic actor Martin Sheen and brother of has-been Emilio Estevez, began his acting career in 1984 with the Cold War teen action movie Red Dawn.

Next came a starring role (and his best role) in Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning Vietnam War drama Platoon. Wall Street, Young Guns, Major League and Hot Shots! movies filled Sheen’s schedule over the intervening years until he made the move to television in 2000, filling the shoes of Michael J. Fox on Spin City. After his successful two years on Spin City, a television show tailor made for Sheen was inevitable, and thus, Two and a Half Men was born.

Two and a Half Men is (or should I say was?) an extremely successful sitcom. So successful, in fact, that the New York Times has called it “the biggest hit comedy of the past decade.” This is a depressing indicator of the quality of modern TV because, frankly, the show stinks. Repetitive storylines, tired jokes, unlikeable characters, and production values that seem straight out of 1994 make this show what it is: a champion of mediocre comedy — but that’s beside the point.

The point is that Two and a Half Men’s success lasted throughout all of Sheen’s past scandals and would likely have survived through his current one. It is only in danger of derailing because producers halted the show’s production after Sheen unleashed a rant against show co-creator and producer, Chuck Lorre. What does it say about a TV watching society when audiences seem more than willing to continue overlooking Sheen’s insane personal foibles and watch his show week after week, and television executives are not? Not something good, that’s for sure.

Sheen responded to this halt in production with a series of rants on every available talk show and celebrity news channel. His jabs at television producers, news commentators and Alcoholics Anonymous indicate that, although his drug tests came up negative, the man’s surely on something. Bizarre statements like “I am on a drug — it’s called Charlie Sheen” only go to prove just how far off the deep end Sheen has gone.

Distressingly, Sheen’s meltdown has only extended the public’s obsession with him. He used to invade our homes every week on his mediocre sitcom and now he invades our homes in the headlines of every news network, even ousting Muammar Gaddafi and the Libyan Revolution as the top story.

Perhaps the saddest and funniest fact of Charlie Sheen’s very public, very strange breakdown is that it counts as the most entertaining moment of his career since Platoon.

His slew of insane rants and tweets (his Twitter feed is a goldmine of hilarious and egotistical comments) are far more entertaining than his mediocre sitcom ever was. Still, when Sheen’s meltdown is all over and done with (or at least banished from the TV headlines), let’s hope society can move on.

It may be too much to hope for, but a pop culture free of Charlie Sheen is a pop culture to look forward to.