Mark Sanford, stop it now. You hear me? Stop it:

“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.”

During an emotional interview at his Statehouse office with The Associated Press on Tuesday, Sanford said Chapur is his soul mate but he’s trying to fall back in love with his wife.

He said that during the encounters with other women he “let his guard down” with some physical contact but “didn’t cross the sex line.” He wouldn’t go into detail.

Right, of course, he wouldn’t go into detail. What do you call what he’s been doing for the past week? Is John Ensign paying Sanford to stay in the spotlight, performing his weepy one-man reality show day after day (“Sanford and Sons”), to distract from Ensign’s more tawdry sex offenses?

Regardless, much as I feel for anyone who stands in front of a camera and cries, Sanford lost me at “I love your tan lines.” Not that anyone expects the Song of Solomon, especially not in email form. But isn’t a little poetry in order if you’re writing to your “soul mate”?

Not to mention the fact that he skipped off to do the dirty over Father’s Day weekend. Maybe I’m just bitter because I was stuck in New York, seeing a mediocre movie, eating mediocre food, and dealing with mediocre melodrama. (We did go see the Avedon exhibit at the ICP, though, which was worth the $12.) But when you have four kids, I think an international tryst that weekend is in especially bad taste.

Ooh, neologism time! When one has been caught “hiking the Appalachian Trail,” one suffers from “Trystesse” — affair-induced melancholy. Eh? Eh?

ETA: Wonkette is similarly horrified, though it chooses to malign Anne of Green Gables for some reason. Leave Anne out of this, Wonkette. She had “bosom friends,” but she never “sparked” with any of them, let alone “crossed the ultimate line.” That we know of, anyway.