Now Mark Sanford says he is "thankful" for the experience afforded him by his extra-marital affair.

Seriously.

In an op-ed written for South Carolina newspapers, Sanford writes:

It is true that I did wrong and failed at the largest of levels, but equally true is the fact that God can make good of our respective wrongs in life. In this vein, while none of us has the chance to attend our own funeral, in many ways I feel like I was at my own in the past weeks, and surprisingly I am thankful for the perspective it has afforded.

Look, Mark, I don't know if you've ever been to a funeral, but what you've been through over the past few weeks -- a five-day vacation with your mistress in Argentina and another five-day vacation with your wife in an undisclosed location (all the while pulling down a fat paycheck) -- isn't anything like a funeral.

If you had resigned as governor, maybe you could claim this was like a funeral of sorts, but judging by the fact that you are keeping yourself in the public eye, you're holding out hopes for your political career, aren't you? In fact, you are trying to nurse it back to life, right? A sort of a political reincarnation, no?

Truth is, you're trying to seduce the Republican electorate by spinning this whole sordid affair as a story of God -- with yourself as the hero, struggling to return from the beyond, a story of your own rebirth. To wit:

I’ve been humbled and broken as never before in my life, and as a consequence have given up areas of control in a way that I never have before. And it is my belief that this will make me a better father, husband, friend and advocate. It’s in the spirit of making good from bad that I am committing to you and the larger family of South Carolinians to use this experience both to trust God in his larger work of changing me and, from my end, to work to becoming a better and more effective leader.

Listen, Mark, you might as well have gone all the way and started talking about what it will be like at your own resurrection, because that's what you're going for here.

Jebus. Talk about a complex. You've got the fever something fierce.