It doesn't matter Patrick unless the page is ranking or leads to an action within your site.

But you don't need to ever delete a page, you can always change it to be what you want.

That's the coolest thing about a website, you can always modify or improve it.

If you delete an indexed page you should redirect it. People that come to your website will get a 404 page not found error.

I believe it takes about a month until it is gone from the index and then you can re-use it.

As long as there is no duplicate created you should be fine as I presume we're talking about one site here. Described here: Quick question about deleting my indexed pages from the search engines?

Patrick, You will receive error messages from Google Webmaster tools and if I remember correctly, Kyle, as well as Jay, said this could also hurt your rank. I am not sure on the ranking part but I do know about the error messages.
I hope this helps.
Ken