Professional football is not your average everyday business. If you miss work and skip meetings and curse out your boss in your average everyday business, you do not get the chance to carry around a loaded weapon while still gainfully employed.

So Plaxico Burress, investment banker, or Plaxico Burress, insurance salesman, would have been fired long before he fired a gun and wounded himself Friday night at a dance club, not exactly the ideal place for people with injured hamstrings to go.

But even NFL teams need to enforce certain standards of common decency. Burress has forfeited his right to ever again wear a Giants jersey, and the franchise he helped to a Super Bowl title should fire him for cause and then fight Burress and his agent and his union reps over the financial terms of the divorce.

Cut him, waive him, kiss him a bittersweet goodbye. Give Burress the Jeremy Shockey treatment, and tell him not to let the Vince Lombardi Trophy hit him on the way out the door.

The Giants need to get rid of their star wide receiver like they got rid of their star tight end, Shockey, who wasn't worth half the trouble he caused. Burress is a better football player than Shockey, and that shouldn't matter a lick.

The Giants need to do to Burress what the Knicks should've done to Stephon Marbury a long time ago.

Plaxico's previous employer, the Pittsburgh Steelers, knew this day was coming. Back at the 2005 draft combine, weeks before Burress was signed by the Giants, three Pittsburgh executives were asked by a prominent agent if they planned on re-signing Plax.

The executives nearly spit out their drinks. They made it crystal clear Burress was done forever in the job once graced by John Stallworth and Lynn Swann.

The Steelers won a Super Bowl without Burress, and the Giants won a Super Bowl with him. In fact, the Giants wouldn't have made it to Glendale, Ariz., and their fateful meeting with the 18-0 Patriots had Burress not dominated the Ice Bowl remake at Lambeau in a way that would've humbled Old Man Lombardi.

Burress played hurt and played heroically in the postseason. He even made a fool of Tom Brady, who ridiculed Plaxico's prediction of a 23-17 Giants' victory five days before Burress scored the winning touchdown and the Patriots went down by a 17-14 count.

Plax had the entire market at his feet. The only thing this region loves more than a winner is a winner who guaranteed the win, and so Burress was all set to go down with Joe Namath and Mark Messier as a beloved big-game prophet.

Then he passed on a mandatory mini-camp and barely practiced in training camp. The Giants finally gave him a $35 million deal and figured the contract bought them some peace and prosperity.

In one of the great mysteries of the play-for-pay universe, Burress has done everything possible to get himself terminated since.

The dozens of fines never added up. Burress didn't show for work one day, didn't bother to call the Giants to explain his absence and didn't care if his excuse I had to take my son to school — sounded worse than, you know, the dog ate my conscience. Burress treated his one-game suspension like one would a free trip to St. Kitts.

"I enjoyed my week off," he said on his return.

That's when you knew this marriage could get uglier than A-Rod's and Christie Brinkley's combined.

Back from his banishment and playing against the 49ers, Burress cursed at Tom Coughlin for millions of TV viewers to see, and the coach declined to bench him. "We talked about it at the half," Coughlin said lamely.

Burress felt fully enabled, even after he was fined for berating and criticizing a ref. Suddenly there was a growing sense among Giants' officials that they might have to follow the lead of the Red Sox and squeeze a second title out of their own Manny Ramirez before making the inevitable trade.

Allegedly fired up for his homecoming game at Pittsburgh, Burress was removed from the starting lineup for blowing off a treatment on his neck. "Does it really bother me or affect me?" he'd said earlier of all the penalties imposed on him. "No."

The man refuses to acknowledge the line separating right from wrong. Burress was ruled out of Sunday's game with the Redskins because of a hamstring injury with the potential to linger and linger, and hours later he decided the road to recovery should start at 48th and Lex, home of the nightclub known as Latin Quarter.

The club's Web site advertised Friday as "Latino Night" and announced, "Hey, this is a dance floor. Sunken, centered and replete with man hands pulling lady legs around their waists."

Who needs ice packs when you can have all that?

It's no surprise Burress decided to treat his injured hammy to a night on the town; he clearly doesn't care about the Giants' drive for a two-peat. But the team's most vocal leader, Antonio Pierce, reportedly was in Burress' company, and if that's true, the Giants need to ask their linebacker what the hell he was thinking.

Burress accidentally shot himself in the right thigh and ended up in the hospital. The police ended up at his Totowa home, where cops had made two previous trips in response to domestic disturbance calls.

This is a legal issue, an issue of law and order, but on the football side the Giants have more than enough evidence to act before the league does. Nobody wants to hear about Burress' cap number, or the millions the Giants have invested in him.

Justice always comes at a heavy price. The Giants have built a championship program around an all-for-one, one-for-all core, and Burress has no interest in playing along.

They need to do the right thing and forget about the wide receiver's talent and all the double teams he commands. If the Giants win a second Super Bowl with Burress in the lineup, they'll lose something more valuable in the process.