On behalf of the people of Illinois and New York, I’d like to thank South Carolina for giving us Mark (“I’ve been unfaithful to my wife”) Sanford. Finally, a governor who’s weirder than Rod Blagojevich and less responsible than Eliot Spitzer.

Really, we’re extremely relieved.

Sanford, as we all now know, went AWOL from his state last week, then re-emerged to admit that he had not been on the Appalachian Trail writing a book, as the chaotic explanations from his family and his staff had suggested, but in South America where he had gone to break up with his lover. “I spent the last five days crying in Argentina,” he said, completely ignoring all we have learned from Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Sanford was widely regarded as a Republican presidential contender. Many of you may have forgotten this, but for a while in 2008 he was a serious candidate to be John McCain’s running mate. (We now stop briefly to contemplate the possibility that there were even worse options than Sarah Palin.) Now, he’s become the second GOP hopeful in a week to do a swan dive off the adultery cliff. Perhaps the party has been too strict about the no-girlfriends-while-running-for-president rule. If they don’t drop it, pretty soon the youngest contender will be 75.

Until Wednesday’s unpleasantness, Sanford was chairman of the Republican Governors Association, otherwise known as the Association of Possible Presidential Contenders Plus Arnold. Over the past few years, he has tried to woo the party’s base with antics like bringing two piglets into the Capitol to protest political pork and refusing to accept $700 million in federal stimulus money aimed at preventing massive layoffs of public school teachers.