AFTER WEEKS of following the labrynthine plot twists of "Jon & Kate Plus 8," Mark Sanford has given us a new knothole to peep through.

The South Carolina governor's tearful mea culpa Wednesday was like a pileup on the interstate, a lot of twisted metal and mangled limbs that you really don't want to see but can't avert your eyes from.

Before that, nothing that I knew about the good guv fascinated me enough to even read past his table of contents. That business about rejecting the Obama stimulus money for his fiscally challenged state was more quirky than intriguing.

When he was overruled by legislative leaders, it sounded to me like a backroom deal to allow him to collect the money and still hold onto his fiscal-conservative credential. Nice move, but barely a footnote in the annals of tricky political ploys.

Even his name being bandied about as a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012 made him one of only about 200 people who could claim that, ahh, distinction.

But when Mr. Straight Life got entangled in an international escapade, he catapulted himself into that special category of people whose lives get picked over like the bargain rack in a discount store.

It's not just that he managed to miss the Appalachian Trail by a couple of thousand miles, or even that his Argentine affair has dominated the news cycle for three days and counting. That would have been something to titter about for a week or so in any era.

But Sanford had the bad fortune to be outed after reality TV had legitimized our prurient interest in the lives of strangers. We not only sneak a passing glance at the wreckage: Now we get to stop and stare.

It doesn't help that news of his affair broke on the heels of Nevada Sen. John Ensign's admittance of an affair with a female aide. It doesn't help that former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey is making the network rounds offering his special insight on high-level infidelity.

And it certainly doesn't help that Sanford was the poster boy for family values who lambasted Bill Clinton as "morally unfit" for office after Clinton's affair became public.

That level of hypocrisy would have caught up with him even when rumors traveled at the trotting pace of a Pony Express rider's horse.

But the media put his business in the street while the lie was still on his lips. By the time he arrived at the airport from Buenos Aires, his hiking yarn was already unraveling.

It goes with the territory. Public officials don't get to have private lives. They know that.

His wife and four sons deserve better. But reality shows that offer guided tours of dysfunctional families set a tone that makes Sanford's family fodder for armchair therapists who practice in prime time.

That's what reality TV is for. It gives us a chance to cluck about people whose families are even more screwed up than ours. It activates our "I woulda" response, as in, "If he did that to me, I woulda . . . "

When Jon and Kate decided to cash in on our interest in their unusual family, they sentenced their children to life in a fishbowl. When they have their own children, there will still be people who can remind them of the time their parents broke up on TV.

Sanford's four sons will always be the boys whose father skipped Father's Day with them to be with his mistress and her children in Argentina. There will always be someone who can quote from the little love notes their dad exchanged with "the other woman."

The good news is that someone else will fall from grace before long. Some brand-new squigglies will be in the petri dish for us to examine, some new knucklehead to cluck about.

There will be another knothole to offer us a narrow view of someone else's dysfunctional family.

Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith