She should have seen it coming all the way down the Appalachian Trail.
South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s long-suffering wife said her philandering husband insisted on striking the promise to be faithful from their wedding vows — and that marrying him was a “leap of faith.”
“It bothered me to some extent but . . . we were very young, we were in love,” Jenny Sanford told Barbara Walters in an interview for “20/20” to air Friday. “I questioned it, but I got past it . . . along with other doubts I had.”
Sanford’s marriage imploded last summer when the Republican governor was forced to admit that he had slipped off to Argentina for a rendezvous with his Argentine lover rather than hiking the Appalachian Trail as he had told staffers.
When Jenny Sanford, a former investment banker and Georgetown graduate, married the governor-to-be in 1989 at age 27, she was stunned by how cheap and unromantic he could be.
For one birthday “he drew me a picture of half a bike, and then for the next birthday or Christmas I got the picture of the other half a bike, and then he delivered a $25 used bike.”
One year, he gave her a diamond necklace, but later took it back, she said.
Sanford left her husband last August and filed for divorce, which will be finalized later this month. She is also set to release a memoir, “Staying True” on Friday.