Sanford’s Sex Scandal: Assessing the Damage

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has never shied away from talking about his religious faith. So perhaps it should have come as no surprise that he invoked “God’s law” throughout his long, rambling press conference on June 24 — after going missing in Buenos Aires for six days — to confess his yearlong extramarital affair with an Argentine woman. But in acknowledging his infidelity, Sanford was actually admitting that he had broken a state law: adultery is still punishable in South Carolina by up to a year in prison and a $500 fine. Fortunately for Sanford, the statute is an unenforced relic. But even if he faces no criminal penalties, Sanford is painfully aware that he will pay in other ways. “I guess where I’m trying to go with this is that there are moral absolutes, and that God’s law indeed is there to protect you from yourself,” Sanford said at the state capitol in Columbia. “And there are consequences if you breach that. This press conference is a consequence.”

It didn’t take long for Sanford to experience the range of other unpleasant consequences of his behavior. Even as pundits were writing the political obituary of a fiscal conservative many had touted as a GOP presidential hopeful for 2012, The State newspaper of Columbia published personal e-mails the governor had sent to his paramour, named Maria. (Thursday’s edition of Buenos Aires newspaper La Nacion identified her as Maria Belen Chapur, a 43-year-old divorced mother of two who lives in the fashionable district of Palermo and works for an agricultural company.) In one, Sanford gushes about Maria’s “magnificent gentle kisses,” tan lines, hips and “erotic beauty.” And while he acknowledges that they are in a “hopelessly impossible love,” his “heart cries out for [her]” and for “an even deeper connection to [her] soul.”

(Read “Mark Sanford: No Longer Missing. Will He Be Missed?”)

The embarrassing missives were just the latest twist in a bizarre scandal that had gripped the state and political observers across the country even before the governor returned from his unexplained absence and revealed his affair. Not even his staff seemed to know exactly where the governor was, and until he was greeted at Atlanta’s airport on the morning of June 24 by a reporter from The State, the official line was that Sanford had been hiking on the Appalachian Trail to clear his head after a tough legislative session. Though even his toughest critics seemed to feel some measure of sympathy for Sanford after his confessional, many believed his admission of “selfishness on my part” applied as much to his public transgression as his personal indiscretions. Going AWOL in South America for almost a week without even telling his staff his whereabouts, they argued, reflected a blatant disregard for the workings of government that has marked his seven years in office.

Sanford, in fact, has always been more effective as a conservative icon than as a conservative governor, a figure popular with the Republican Party’s red-meat base but in chronic conflict with South Carolina’s GOP-controlled legislature. When TIME ranked him in 2005 as one of the nation’s worst state chief executives, it was because his fiscal hard-liner theatrics (carrying piglets under each arm to the door of the state legislature to protest pork-barrel spending) rarely yielded real results. In too many instances, his conservative principles thwarted the economic development of a poor Southern state that has the country’s third-highest unemployment rate and some of its most decrepit schools. Still, South Carolina’s deeply conservative voters re-elected him in 2006, and last year Sanford became chairman of the Republican Governors Association. “But he always seemed to care more about his ideology than about rolling up his sleeves and figuring out how to get things done,” says Bruce Ransom, a political science professor at Clemson University in South Carolina.

The latest showcase involved President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package. Sanford led a group of GOP governors, including Alaska’s Sarah Palin and Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, assailing it as fiscal suicide. Sanford even likened it to the hyper-inflationary policies of Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, and he spent the past spring fighting to reject a quarter of South Carolina’s $2.8 billion share of the funds unless he could use it to reduce the state’s debt.

See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.

When he lost that battle with the courts and legislature last week, Sanford, who can be as eccentric as he is thin-skinned, simply disappeared (although staffers insist they could reach him by cell phone in case of emergency). “I’ve spent the last five days of my life crying in Argentina,” he said at the capitol in Columbia. “I’m committed to getting my heart right. I’ve been unfaithful to my wife. I’ve let down a lot of people. I apologize.”

Sanford said he’ll resign the RGA’s chairmanship but refused to say whether he’ll step down as governor. His friend and former chief of staff, state senator Tom Davis, says Sanford “shouldn’t resign, even though I say that with reservations given what’s happened the past few days. He deserves the chance to rebuild the trust of the state, and I think today’s confession was a good start,” Davis told TIME. “I think he’s done an extraordinarily good job as governor of alerting people to issues that have been swept under the rug for far too long in South Carolina, like the need to reform the fiscally irresponsible structure of its government. He’s shown the same conservative leadership that Barry Goldwater displayed in the 1960s, getting the Republican Party back to its roots.”

(Read “Republicans in Distress: Is the Party Over?”)

Whatever happens, Sanford’s bizarre tango — coming less than a week after another GOP presidential hopeful, Nevada Senator John Ensign, admitted having an extramarital affair with a staffer — is yet another scandalous blow to his party’s family-values image. Democrats, as former President Clinton and more recently former North Carolina Senator John Edwards proved, are hardly immune to these disasters. But Sanford, a conservative Christian, has long portrayed himself as a model family man devoted to his wife of 20 years and their four sons. While he asked for his state’s forgiveness, his hypocrisy and that of many other Republicans of late may exhaust the patience of Bible Belt voters. “A lot of Bible-steeped power brokers will still give him a pass,” says John Jeter, a South Carolina writer whose new novel, The Plunder Room, examines Southern mores. “But American and especially Southern conservatism is going to have to find a new kind of face.”

Critics like South Carolina state senator Hugh Leatherman, a Republican, say it’s Sanford’s professional infidelity that stands to short-circuit his national political ambitions. “People will forgive private sins,” says Leatherman, “but not a governor lying to them like this. This is an issue of governance. He can complain all he wants about the political bubble, but a governor is on duty 24/7.” Even Lieut. Governor Andre Bauer slammed Sanford for being MIA. Leatherman, like many South Carolina pols, is not yet calling for Sanford’s resignation, but he says Sanford “can’t be effective as a governor” from now until his second and final term ends next year.

(See the top six Sanford Tweets.)

Sanford said his wife Jenny, herself a savvy politico who was instrumental in her husband’s rise from real estate broker to U.S. Representative to governor, had known of the affair for about five months. In her own statement on June 24, she said that while she had asked Sanford to leave two weeks ago — the reason she herself didn’t know where he was the past week — the couple has agreed to a “trial separation with the goal of ultimately strengthening our marriage.” But in a dig at Sanford, she added, “I will continue to pour my energy into raising our sons to be honorable young men.”

Ironically, Sanford said he became involved with Maria, whom he met eight years ago while on a government trip to Argentina, while trying to help Maria work out her separation from her own husband. In one of her e-mails to Sanford, however, she insists, “You are my love.” She adds, “Sometimes you don’t choose things, they just happen.” On a private level, Sanford, like any human being, can be excused for succumbing to that inconvenient rule of the heart. But in the public arena, the erratic behavior of the past week seems to confirm what detractors have argued for years — that his constituents also suffer from his self-indulgence.

See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.