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Textual InfidelityE-mail, adultery, and Mark Sanford.

By William SaletanPosted Thursday, July 2, 2009, at 7:26 AM ET

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Sanford and his paramour, Maria Belen Chapur, had three problems. One, they were married to other people. Two, he was a governor with national ambitions. Three, they lived on different continents. E-mail solved all three problems. Sanford says they met in South America in 2001 and, after "he counseled her into the night about her failing marriage"—whatever that means—"struck up an e-mail correspondence" that lasted seven years. The governor took pains to conceal their few visits, paying hotel bills by cash to make sure, as he put it, that no one would "find a credit card record." Yet he poured his heart, his soul, and occasionally his loins into Chapur's Hotmail account. Last fall, according to Chapur, somebody hacked into the account and forwarded the e-mails to South Carolina's leading newspaper, the State.

The e-mails doomed the governor. They put the State on his trail, and when he returned from Argentina last week, a State reporter, acting on a tip, confronted him. The paper told Sanford's aides that it had the e-mails. At that point, Sanford called a press conference and spilled the whole story. According to the State, "the governor's office said it would not dispute the authenticity of the e-mails." How could it? They were too full of details nobody else would know. That's what happens when you write letters: Every thought and reference is preserved.

Sanford's e-mails paint a vivid and sad picture. It's a picture of two people in love but tragically bound by commitments they have already made. A man who has been married for two decades seems to be discovering, for the first time, how love feels. He writes of solitude, longing, and spirituality in a style that oscillates between Spanish love songs and bad country music. He seems naive about everything: love, poetry, and e-mail. He is writing for publication and doesn't know it.

Wise up, cheaters. Your passion for what's-her-name may be gone with the sunrise, but text is forever. Just because it has vanished from your screen doesn't mean it has ceased to exist, any more than your wife and kids cease to exist when you fly to Argentina.

But I'm wasting my words. Even after they're parted, cyber-lovers can't quit their habit. On Sunday, Chapur e-mailed her tale of the affair's discovery to a colleague, who promptly posted it. And on Monday, Sanford sent all his "friends" an e-mail spinning the affair as a Christian reason to stay in office. "Thank you for taking the time to read this," he concluded.

You're welcome, Mark. Now, please: Stop writing.

(Now playing at the Human Nature blog: 1) Two men, no uterus. 2) The increase in U.S.-Mexico border tunnels. 3) Why people are disappearing into cyberspace.)

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. Follow him on Twitter here.

Illustration by Robert Neubecker.

COMMENTS

Regardless of what one may think of Sanford's behavior, to this reader of non-fiction and biographies I find it disheartening that more and more people are losing the fine art of letter writing. If I had read Sanford's "letters" many years from now, I may have thought him to be quite the romantic, in spite of his bad judgment or some might say juvenile ramblings.

Old letters convey an intangible something that can never be gotten from a phone call or e-mail. And whether they be damning or praiseworthy, letters provide tangible evidence of the truth. So much history has been preserved in letters that without them how could we ever be trustful of our past.

Thankfully, the telephone and the internet were not around several hundred years ago.

-- dantesfurlough
(To reply, click here)

I completely agree about the value of letters, though I have to question the idea that "letters provide tangible evidence of the truth." I think that much of any of our communication is driven by telling our audience what they want to hear, and honestly, as a male and a father of daughters made fairly suspicious by my own memories, I have to wonder how much of Sanford's writing was unedited romance pouring from his heart and how much of it was an effort, literally and literarily, to charm the pants off this particular woman.

-- phark
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