Wasn't this a Nicholas Sparks novel?

Rant alert: This is an uncensored reaction to today’s news…

I have had enough.

I swear if I hear one more wimpy, self-absorbed apology from one more immature, oversexed, morally corrupt politician claiming to want the public’s prayers for his long-suffering and humiliated wife, I think I’ll hurl into the next county.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford today admitted that his five-day disappearance to recover from a busy and challenging legislative session was, in fact, just a five-day tryst in Argentina with a woman he met online.

How original.

Oh wait…wasn’t this the plot of Nicholas Sparks novel?

While the governor enjoyed an exotic get-away complete with long walks on the beach while holding the hand of his girlfriend, his wife was left at home with their four young sons and a hungry corps of reporters who wanted information about his whereabouts. She told them she wasn’t worried about him and indicated that he was on a working retreat to tackle some writing projects without interruption from their boys.

Gosh, one can see how interruptions from the boys would have been…awkward. But Sanford’s wife Jenny ought to have been worried after all.

Apparently, Mrs. Sanford has known about this affair for five months, or so the governor said during the excruciating press conference in which he admitted his unfaithfulness. Oddly, this seemed to imply that his disappearance was somehow OK since his wife at least knew about the presence of another woman in their marriage.

As if to give the extra-marital relationship greater credibility and justify its purity, he said the affair began “innocently enough” as a “dear dear” friendship. It grew into “something more” – make that “something much more” – during the past year. Reports say he has been involved with this woman over a period of some eight years.

Sorry, Guv. Eight years is plenty of time to realize you are carrying on an affair of the heart, which, out of a sense of fidelity to the woman who vowed to wipe your spittle in your old age, you ought to have stopped before it turned into “something much more.”

Mark Sanford is pathetic, and I for one am entirely fed up with middle-aged politicians assuming a mantle of power and then, out of an inflated ego or a sense of boredom or some other pathology which I truly do not care to understand, acting on the basest, most juvenile fantasies of lust and romance.

I get that marriage in our culture is under siege, and it’s possible Sanford fell victim to a woman who simply would not respect that he was taken and therefore off limits. Nobody’s perfect, people make mistakes, marriage takes work, yada, yada, yada.

I also get that Sanford seemed remorseful, though the fact that he claimed he and his wife were trying to “work through” their marital problems loses its punch when he’s confessing he just spent five days with his mistress. Um, Guv… a getaway is often a good strategy to save the marriage, but usually you take your wife, not your babe.

Sanford is just another in a long line of politicians – Republican, Democrat, straight, gay, straight-but-turned-out-to-be-gay, porn addicted, sex-addicted, text-message-addicted, prostitute-paying politicians – who, once caught, deliver the same worn out speech, the same feeble apology.

Next will be a few weeks of defense while he assesses the damage to his family and career. Depending on how mad he made his constituents and his staff, he’ll either resign now (and write a book) or fade into political obscurity (and write a book).

His poor wife, of course, will have to deal with the fallout to her family while she figures out whether to file for divorce or struggle in a marriage that clearly has one too many participants.

The Sanford’s story is tragic, but it didn’t have to be. Perhaps if Gov. Sanford had been as stalwart about resisting an emotional attachment to another woman as he was in resisting federal stimulus funds, he’d be enjoying a healthy marriage and lots of welcome interruptions from four boys who deserve “much more.”

Is it any wonder our politicians have so little moral authority?