There really is nothing worse than prurience.  Its the ugliest manifestation of hypocrisy, because it requires a flagellating doublethink from all parties, including the disapproving scolds who lust after titillating updates.

Mark Sanford is a prurient person.  Cops soliciting sex and busting people for prostitution is one thing.  Playing up the sexual angle of a scandal that’s not really about sex but rather, dereliction of duty, is entirely another.  Telling your staff you’re hiking the Appalachian Trail when you’re really jetting off to Argentina for a few days renders you totally unfit to govern a state.  (Add to this the equally unacceptable attempt to rewrite state trade law to favor the paramour’s nation and industry).

How many Republicans like to fashion themselves as corporate-style managers?  If you ignore the rarefied air of actually being a governor, this is something for which a person would be immediately fired, for cause, in the beloved private sector.  It’s like fucking the cleaning woman on the copy machine.  Your response can’t be, “I didn’t know that was frowned upon here.”  Nor can you go for this:

The governor said he “never crossed the ultimate line” with anyone but Maria Belen Chapur, the Argentine at the center of a scandal that has derailed his once-promising political career… He said that during the encounters with other women he “let his guard down” with some physical contact but “didn’t cross the sex line.” He wouldn’t go into detail.

That is pure Clintonian bullshit.  The “ultimate line” is rape, not mere sex.  And serial philandery is serial philandery irrespective of penetration.  (I mean that as a neutral observation, and not as a judgment).  Sanford’s defense is the same thing as questioning what the definition of is is.  Considering the limitless traction the right got out of Monica et al, and the president’s lawyerly non-denials–which, incidentally, came during a deposition that did not afford him the opportunity to play coy as a press conference did for Sanford–conservatives should be glad that elected liberals generally refrain from gleefully squeezing political mileage out of sex.

And the reason for that is because generally, liberals are okay with sex ed and condoms and gay people and women choosing to abort and all the hot issues that revolve around sex–which reactionaries have built an entire political party out of emotional and pious responses to.  That is to say, prurience is as intrinsic to contemporary Republicanism as capital gains tax cuts are.  It doesn’t matter if you become a massive hypocrite or everyone’s portfolios hemorrhaged money in fiscal ‘08.  It’s just the way it is.

Then there’s this:

Sanford said Chapur is his soul mate but he’s trying to fall back in love with his wife.

Ouch.  This wasn’t exactly a garden-variety scandalette to begin with, so if you’re trying to portray yourself as a repentant playa, you might want to be nicer to your spouse.

Another family values hypocrite down.  What a shame.  Of course, he’s not out yet.  He might just pull through, banking on the prurience and gullibility of his constituents.