This video brings back some bad memories as I head to the second anniversary of my wife’s sudden death. Grace battled alcoholism our whole marriage, and the careful, plodding, slightly slurred speech pattern you hear above from Rep. Fitzgibbon is exactly how she would speak when she was smashed and trying to hide it. Sober, she was quick-tongued and sparklingly articulate.
I feel sympathy for Fitzgibbon, but he has to resign, and so far doesn’t have the integrity to do it. Fortunately for him, he belongs to a side of the ideological spectrum that doesn’t believe in responsibility or accountability among their other ethical quirks.
Fitzgibbon, to his credit, at least issued an ethical apology for his disgraceful conduct, except for one teeny-tiny omission: there was no “therefore, today I tender my resignation as representative of the 34th District”:
Ethics Alarms 
I’ve been drunk at work and have realized how poor that decision was and never did it again, as a school teacher it was highly irresponsible.
Teaching school while drunk? That justifies having your license revoked. There’s a lot of trust involved in leaving a teacher alone and unsupervised with a class or students. This person had shattered that trust. Be gone.
People who have not spent time around an alcoholic expect them all to sound like Foster Brooks, and to them, this guy probably doesn’t sound that impaired. To those of use who have lived with one, we recognize the deliberate speech style as someone who is accustomed to trying to hide their inebriation.
A “functioning alcoholic” is only functioning because people around him/her are scrambling to cover for errors and forgotten promises. It’s an illusion.