The Elusive Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina

Okay, I couldn’t resist commentary on this one. It’s just too rich in detail to pass by.

The illustrious and respected conservative Mark Sanford of South Carolina gave us all a treat this week with his flight from responsibility and pressure into the arms of an Argentinian mistress, without passing the mantle of government to his most capable lieutenant governor and without even telling his staff where he could be reached. This is the stuff of which operattas are made, and surely we will see a number of them on this very case before the decade is out. The story has all the elements—love, sex, power, betrayal, secrecy, possible misuse of funds, and media excitement and confusion fuging in the background.

I particularly liked the use of the Appalachian Trail as the cover for where he was. It was a stroke of genius so blinding as to be too cute by half. Hiking the Appalachian Trail has an air of macho derring-do about it—an air of solitary wisdom—an air of environmental concern—an air of youthful energy—and an air of relevant hipness--all qualities that the public would most like to have in a presidential candidate. It was such a perfect excuse for a prospective presidential candidate for 2012, in fact, that no one believed it. We all sat around waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it surely did, in the form of a separated woman with two sons in Argentina who was evidently good at sending sympathetic emails. Good God. If ever an affair reflected the contorted magic of our technological times it was this one.

Okay, who had ‘Argentinian mistress’ in the ‘Reason for Sanford’s Mysterious Absence’ Pool?

But as the media slobbers over those tantalizing emails, we must not forget that it isn’t the affair itself that is most significant to the character, or lack thereof, of this man at the head of South Carolina. It’s that he so got wrapped up in his own needs and desires, the people and government of South Carolina came a very distant second to him. Adulterers will come and go in this world—so to speak—but not doing the job you are paid to do always deserves a punishment fitting the crime.
So as we wave a fond farewell to Governor Sanford’s political career, let us remember to re-focus ourselves on what is truly important to us as citizens. Not the idle proselytizing of pompous blowhards who believe their own PR a little too much—nor the high moral tone that always turn out to be a bit of a joke--but the actual care and work put into the ‘public service’ of the positions they are elected to do. “We will know them by their fruits’ is one of those biblical phrases Republicans can appreciate. Let’s hope they will live by the phrase in the choice of their leadership.