inputFile:
1 Foo Joe 123
2 Bar 456
3 Stuff Fred 789

The following will print the first column and and the word EMPTY next to it if the number of fields is equal to 3:

awk '{if (NF==3) print $1" EMPTY"; else print $1,$3}' inputFile
output:
1 Joe
2 EMPTY
3 Fred

Most likely however, you would want to make sure the the number of fields is equal to 4:

awk '{if (NF!=4) print $1" EMPTY"; else print $1,$3}' inputFile
This will get you the same output as above.

If the line is bad, then you probably have no idea which field is missing. You may want to just print the lines that have 4 columns and generate a error message to stderr. You would want to use the record number NR (this is the line in the file that you are on) to generate an error message and print the whole line $0. You write to stderr by redirecting the print statement with this >"/dev/stderr".

awk '{if (NF!=4) print NR" bad format: "$0 > "/dev/stderr"; else print $1,$3}' inputFile

You can redirect the errors from this to some file "error.log" and still write a valid oputFile:

awk '{if (NF!=4) print NR" bad format: "$0 > "/dev/stderr"; else print $1,$3}' inputFile >outputFile 2>error.log

Alternately, you may write directly to error.log from awk:

awk '{if (NF!=4) print NR" bad format: "$0 > "error.log"; else print $1,$3}' inputFile >outputFile

I would recommend writing to stderr. If your awk line appears in a script.file then you may redirect all errors from the script to single file:

script.file 2> allerrors.log

Then if you either extract the 1st adn 3rd columns or cut the 2nd you'll end up with skewed results because line's 2nd column is now "456".

An "easy syntax for column ranges" is a syntax that allows you to specify column '1-99' instead of '$1, $2, $3, ..., $99' or some inlined for loop. I couldn't find one for awk. If you know one, do tell! And I'm glad you like the site. Now that some comments came in, I have a motivation to start writing for it again!