South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford was so strange he turned down $700 million in stimulus for his state. He’s been mentioned as a possible candidate for the GOP nomination in for 2012.

This week he “went missing”.  His staff put out the story he was hiking the Appalachian Trail. He took a longer hike than expected.  In Newsweek Andrew Romano says Sanford’s Argentine rendezvous  show’s he’s just another pathetic pol cheating for sex.  Romano seems offended that Sanford violated his earlier profile of him as a different kind of politician.

Gary Kamiya in Salon takes a surprisingly more sympathetic view.  He portrays Sanford as complex, introspective, and tormented by an  affair of the heart, not a “bimbo eruption”.  So Sanford still isn’t your average horndog.  We’ll have to wait to see if South Carolinians prefer Horndogs or French Poodles.