The ongoing saga of South Carolina’s philandering governor shall not die, not as long as The State keeps insisting on perpetrating acts of journalism. Today they uncovered the behind-the-scenes goings-on of the Sanford office while he was AWOL in Argentina. We already knew his staff had no idea where he was and couldn’t get in touch with him. But now we can also glimpse how they handled the media’s inquiries. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, for example, simply asked Sanford’s communications director, Joel Sawyer, “Dude, is everything okay?” — to which Sawyer lied, “Yep. Slow news day.” But he wasn’t the only person blaming the media. Another one was fellow South Carolinian Stephen Colbert, who e-mailed Sawyer at 1:23 p.m. on June 24: “If the Governor is looking for a friendly place to make light of what I think is a small story that got blown out of scale, I would be happy to have him on.” He signed off with “Stay Strong, Stephen.” This was, oh, about one hour and eight minutes before Sanford admitted to his sordid affair. Whoops. In his defense, Colbert could have simply been feigning sympathy to snag an interview. We know how he likes to pretend.
