Two of my favorite scenes are the scenes in a Stitch in Crime and Exercise when he loses his cool. If he got angry on a regular basis these scenes would not have stood out. Hey give the guy a break, he is a homicide detective in what was then the third largest city in the US. Not an easy occupation and one that was filled with a great deal of stress. He is entitled to show anger especially when two individual's lives are in peril.
I think that many of us would have "lost it" much worse than Columbo when dealing with slime like Mayfield and Janus.
The difference being of course that we're dissecting scripts involved in dealing with inventive and wealthy perpetrators, not the unpredictable and amoral actions of street drug users carrying loaded weapons.
We have to remember that we are analyzing a TV show, not the facts constructed around the notion of a real life. However, that sort of unbridled belief is the very reason why we all adore Hollywood-contrived characters like Columbo, ain't it? I mean, of what good would devotion be without it?