Only good-natured, responsible people have become sysops so far. The type of user likely to indulge in a bar brawl such as you described either abstains from requesting admin rights, or is vetoed by others. We're actually a fairly well-behaved bunch here (a bunch of what, I won't say :)
Just wanted to illustrate that as maybe a good criteria to sysophood.
All of this; in other words... can ''my sysop beat up your sysop?" Ed's qualification of "good nature" is of course, very subjective.. -SV