A broken install of apache2 can't be removed

Trying to remove apache2 fails in broken installation if "/etc/init.d/apache2
stop" doesn't work. should the uninstall really fail this way?:

$ sudo apt-get remove apache2-common
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  apache2 apache2-common apache2-mpm-prefork
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 3 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives.
After unpacking 3703kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y
(Reading database ... 100174 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing apache2 ...
Removing apache2-mpm-prefork ...
 * Stopping web server (Apache2)...
                                                                    [fail]
invoke-rc.d: initscript apache2, action "stop" failed.
dpkg: error processing apache2-mpm-prefork (--remove):
 subprocess pre-removal script returned error exit status 1
dpkg: apache2-common: dependency problems, but removing anyway as you request:
 apache2-mpm-prefork depends on apache2-common (= 2.0.53-5ubuntu3).
Removing apache2-common ...
 * Stopping web server (Apache2)...
                                                                    [fail]
invoke-rc.d: initscript apache2, action "stop" failed.
Errors were encountered while processing:
 apache2-mpm-prefork
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)