As David Letterman wraps up his Late Show on CBS, he admits, CBS could have got rid of him years ago.

Page Six writes that Letterman says that CBS had “good reason” to cut him loose after his cataclysmic 2009 intern-and-extortion flameout, or, as he jokingly calls it, “My sex scandal.”

But they didn’t, and, “I owe them that,” the legendary funnyman told The New York Times.

“Looking at it now, yes, I think they would have had good reason to fire me,” Letterman, 68, told the paper as his May 20 retirement looms.

“But at the time, I was largely ignorant as to what, really, I had done,” he said of the scandal, in which a $2 million extortion attempt led him to admit on air to having cheated on his wife with multiple underlings, including assistant Stephanie Birkitt.

“It just seemed like, OK, well, here’s somebody who had an intimate relationship with somebody he shouldn’t have had an intimate relationship with,” he added.

“And I always said, ‘Well, who hasn’t?’ to myself.

“But then, when I was able to see from the epicenter, the ripples, I thought, yeah, they could have fired me. But they didn’t. So I owe them that.”