When Governor Mark Sanford tearfully admitted last week that he had an affair with some gal who he actually liked a lot, many people wrote approvingly of his candor, and the fact that he didn’t say “Meh, I was just boning some slutty slut, it meant nothing.” He had feelings and things, and maybe a decent amount of respect for his mistress! But now we learn that all of his “dear, dear friend” claptrap was just a precursor to a torrent of undignified, cruelly narcissistic oversharing. MORE »

Well here is a sort of sad but interesting angle on the Sanford Firecracker Love Scandal, straight from The State reporter Gina Smith, who drove 200 miles to corner the exhausted governor of South Carolina at 6:15 in the morning yesterday as he was arriving back at the Atlanta airport, probably all morning breath-y. MORE »

We knew there had to be a “paying off some 19-year-old boy” aspect of this dull John Ensign story, and here it is: A Republican committee paid Nevada Senator John Ensign’s illicit girlfriend’s son $5,400 during the SAME EXACT TIME Ensign and the lady were humping. This teen-ager was given the dirty GOP money for “research policy consulting,” which is even more bogus-sounding that our business expenses. ALSO: Our friends at the Las Vegas Gleaner inform us that Ensign was putting his peen into this lady before he was legally separated from his wife. MORE »

THE SLEAZEBAG’S LAMENT: “On the local wingnut talk radio station, the loudmouth host and halfwit callers were high-fiving each other for talking about creepy John Edwards cheating on his cancer-stricken wife long before Wolf Blitzer or whoever mentioned it. So we’ve got Edwards’ foul behavior, the Responsible Media’s shameful behavior, and the wingnuts’ shameless behavior. This is not exactly America’s finest moment.” [AOL Political Machine]

Aging pretty-boy multi-millionaire John Edwards was a senator for a few years after a lucrative career as a personal-injury lawyer. For some reason, this made him John Kerry’s pretend vice president, which led to a sweeping Edwards’ fail in this year’s Democratic primary. And now he’s shutting down the scholarship program he started for poor kids at a North Carolina high school. MORE »

WONKETTE ON CNN, THIS AFTERNOON Your Wonkette editor Jim Newell will be on CNN at 1 p.m. Eastern, today at some point, talking about … Barbara Walters having a sex affair with a Republican senator in the 1970s!

We are liking this Governor Paterson fellow a whole lot. Not only does he make hilarious cracks about lobbyist whores, he openly admits to having affairs while serving in the New York State Senate. We are only sorry that he and his wife seem to have mended fences and will not be having any more affairs any time soon. But but but! Not one but TWO Spitzer officials say that one of the gals he used to romance now “works under” the new governor of New York. MORE »