The Federal Bureau of Investigation is supposed to be the very best of law enforcement, like the New England Patriots of police work. It’s difficult to get your foot in the door, then there’s the grueling training regimen at Quantico just to become an FBI agent. It’s not easy by any stretch of the imagination.

For one to claw their way up the ranks, it’s even harder.

As a result, you’d expect a supervisor within the Bureau to have an understanding of hard-partying behavior and how it can result in waking up in bad situations. Truthfully, he probably does. He just didn’t heed that understanding.

An F.B.I. counterterrorism supervisor is under internal investigation after a woman stole his gun following a night of heavy drinking in a North Carolina hotel, according to documents and government officials.

In July, Robert Manson, a unit chief in the F.B.I.’s international terrorism section, had his Glock .40-caliber handgun, a $6,000 Rolex watch and $60 in cash stolen from his room at the Westin hotel in Charlotte, N.C., according to a police report.

The episode is an embarrassing mishap for the F.B.I. As a unit chief assigned to the bureau’s headquarters, Mr. Manson oversees all terrorism investigations in the Midwest and the Carolinas. An F.B.I. spokesman, Michael P. Kortan, said the incident was the subject of an internal investigation and declined to give additional comment.

Mr. Manson and other senior agents were in Charlotte for training, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the episode. The agents later told the police that they had been drinking with women who said they were exotic dancers, according to a second person who was briefed on the investigation but, like the first, was not authorized to discuss it publicly.

“Investigators determined that the victim, Robert Manson, met a woman in the hotel bar the prior night and took her back to his hotel room,” Robert Tufano, a spokesman for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, said in a statement.

The weapon was identified in the report as a Glock 27 and it was believed to have been stolen between 2:00 and 5:00 in the morning. Manson was unconscious when police were called at 6:30 due to the alcohol.

The woman is identified only as “an unknown suspect.”

Not a banner day over at the FBI.

Remember, though, that there are some people who only want law enforcement armed and will ignore incidents like this when discussing their gun control Utopia. They forget that police on any level are only human, which makes them susceptible to all kinds of manipulation or exploitation. Was Manson targetted because he was FBI? After all, if someone knew senior agents would be in the area, it’s not unreasonable to guess they’d have a gun.

Of course, there are also easier ways to steal a gun, so who knows.

What I do know is that Manson is probably in a great deal of trouble at the moment, trouble that he would likely visit on his junior agents if this had happened to them, and justifiably so.