OPINION: Gov. Sanford should resign

For several months S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford gained national attention for his stubborn stance on the use of federal stabilization funds. Now he is receiving national scrutiny again in a far more troubling way. With about 18 months remaining in his second and final term, Gov. Sanford should resign from office.

In a press conference Wednesday following his baffling disappearance of nearly a week, the governor acknowledged he had been in Argentina, where he said he has ended an affair with a woman there that began about a year ago. As a husband and the father of four young sons, Sanford's first responsibility has to be his family. He cannot fulfill those family obligations while remaining governor of a state that's in severe economic crisis.

His affair, however, is a personal matter and should be treated as such. His bizarre missing governor act is of greater concern to this state and why he should leave office.

Governors, of course, don't have the intense security detail that would follow a sitting president. During his visits to Aiken, Sanford was often accompanied by a single staff member or two. Even when traveling alone or with his family, he would always be available to his chief of staff and other top people in his office.

It is simply astounding that the governor deliberately would withhold his location from his own staff and SLED - putting his spokesman in the inadvertent position of misleading the media and other public officials. Out of the country and unavailable to anyone, Sanford had made no provision to transfer power temporarily to Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer. As Bob McAlister, former chief of staff for the late Gov. Carroll Campbell said in published reports, "From a professional standpoint, this can't happen. It's very disconcerting."

For the past seven years, the tenure of Gov. Sanford has been continually frustrating. He has promoted some reasonable reforms, among them government restructuring and eliminating the practice of attaching legislation to unrelated bills at the last minute. But the governor's ceaseless unwillingness to communicate and compromise earned him only enmity from most legislators of both parties. He has never supported public education and has generally tried to undermine it - most recently with his efforts to turn down badly-needed federal funds for schools after major state cuts.

Tragically, Wednesday's news conference presented a different Gov. Sanford - perhaps for the first time - revealing himself as a human being with real emotion of sorrow and regrets. If he had brought emotion and empathy to his work as governor, the state would be better off and Sanford would be better off as a politician and public official. Now it may be too late.