He only stopped requesting to see the other woman when Jenny threatened to kick him out of the house and run off with their children.

When the governor declared that he was leaving town to “get his head right,” his wife made him promise that he was not going to see the other woman.

“I will not see her,” he told Jenny.

“I shiver when I think that while I was cleaning up after a delicious family meal with the boys and their cousins, he was e-mailing his ‘soulmate’ with visions of her tan lines,” she writes.

The fallout

When the governor finally landed back in the United States to intense media attention after disappearing for several days to see his mistress, he called Jenny to ask, “How are you doing?”

“How am I?” she responded. “How do you think I am?”

“Jenny, be gentle with me,” the governor said.

“Gentle?” she shot back. “Do you know what kind of a storm you are returning to? And where do we stand?”

Sanford told his wife that he had ended the affair and that he had met with a reporter at the Atlanta airport upon his arrival and “told her of my love of adventure travel and so on.”

Jenny doubted that her husband’s story would hold, and when national scrutiny heightened and the governor decided to hold a press conference, she advised him to “be honest and get it over with.”

“Whatever you do, don’t talk about your heart,” she said.

The governor, of course, did not follow his wife’s advice, holding an emotional tear-filled press conference in which he confessed his love for his “soulmate.”

After the press conference, he called Jenny to ask: “How’d I do?”

“Are you kidding me? You cried for her and said little of me or the boys,” she responded.

Of the exchange, she writes: “I guess he’d forgotten I was not the one to praise his performance.”