By all rights, Mark Sanford should have faded into political oblivion after handing the governorship of South Carolina to Nikki Haley. But he's now running for his old seat in Congress--and has a decent chance of winning it. The mere fact he can even think about running for anything again, though, proves just how morally bankrupt the Republican Party is at present.
Think about it, folks. We're talking about a guy who willfully went AWOL from his post as governor. It doesn't matter why he did it--the fact is that he left his state rudderless for almost a week. And yet, the Republicans call themselves the party of personal responsibility? Contrast that with what happened in 2008 when we found out Tim Mahoney, a Democratic congressman from FL-16, paid hush money to his honey to keep her from talking to the press. We pretty much abandoned him, even though it was a Republican-leaning district and we were likely to lose it. But we didn't want to keep the seat badly enough to have it held by a scoundrel. As it turned out, it took us two terms to get that seat back (it's now FL-18, held by Patrick Murphy).
If a Democratic governor or president did this, ten to one most of us would be screaming for his or her impeachment. But that's probably because as Democrats, we actually expect our officeholders to take their duties seriously. After this, I don't ever want to hear anything about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky ever again.