COLUMBIA, SC — South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford yesterday declared his Argentinian mistress his “soul mate” but said he is committed to reconciling with his wife in hopes of saving his family and what is left of his political career.
Sanford, who also admitted meeting his lover more times than he had previously claimed, told The Associated Press in emotional interviews that he “crossed lines” with a handful of other women during 20 years of marriage.
But he said he never went as far as he did with Maria Belen Chapur, the woman at the center of the scandal that has derailed his once-promising political future.
“What I would say is that I’ve never had sex with another woman. Have I done stupid? I have,” the governor said.
“You know you meet someone. You dance with them. You go to a place where you probably shouldn’t have gone . . . If you’re a married guy at the end of the day, you shouldn’t be dancing with somebody else.
“So anyway, without wandering into that field, we’ll just say that I let my guard down in all senses of the word without ever crossing the line that I crossed with this situation.”
Even with the latest revelations, Sanford maintained he is fit to govern and has no plans to resign. And he insisted his relationship with Chapur, whom he met at an open-air dance spot in Uruguay eight years ago, was more than just sex.
“This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story,” Sanford said. “A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day.”
Sanford said he is trying to fall back in love with his wife even as he grapples with his deep feelings for Chapur.
“I will be able to die knowing that I had met my soul mate,” Sanford said of Chapur. “But it was one of those things. I knew the cost.”
Sanford detailed more encounters with his mistress than he had disclosed during a rambling, emotional press conference last week. The new revelations led the state attorney general yesterday to launch an investigation of his travels, and some are calling for him to step down.
Among the encounters was what he described as a farewell meeting in New York this past winter, chaperoned by a spiritual adviser and sanctioned by his wife soon after she found out about the affair.
But he saw Chapur again, this time over Father’s Day weekend, leaving the country without telling his staff and leading them to believe he was hiking the Appalachian Trail.
Sanford told the AP he saw Chapur five times over the past year, including two romantic, multi-night stays with her in New York — one in Manhattan, one in the Hamptons, both paid for in cash so no one would know — before they met there again intending to break up.
He said he saw her two other times before that, including their first meeting. “There was some kind of connection from the very beginning,” he said, though neither that encounter nor a 2004 coffee date in New York during the Republican National Convention were romantic.
Their relationship turned physical, he said, during a government trip to Brazil and Argentina in June 2008, and when he returned, the e-mails they had exchanged for years began to reflect their anguish over what they had done.