On Friday, known in politics as "Take out the Trash Day," Joel Sawyer announced that he will be leaving his $65,000-per-year state government job to "pursue other opportunities in the private sector."

What? You've never heard of Joel Sawyer?

You're familiar with his work, in a manner of speaking. You just don't know it.

As the South Carolina dramedy -- "Sanford and Sin?" -- continues to play out, two things become increasingly evident:

First, potentially former Gov. Mark Sanford is driving his handlers crazy.

Second, his wife Jenny looks less and less like the politician's wife, and more and more like a politician herself -- and a pretty good one, at that.

She's even got her own fan club on Twitter.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's admission of an extramarital affair has knocked him out of the running for the GOP nomination for President in 2012. The question now is, whom has his withdrawal from the field most helped?

Answer: Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

When Sanford resigns -- as he will most assuredly have to do -- the state's Lieutenant Governor, Andre Bauer, will ascend to the governorship.

Bauer, already an announced candidate for the GOP nomination next year, would become an incumbent running for election to a full term of his own in 2010.

Wags are already predicting the New York tabloid headlines for tomorrow's morning coverage of Mark Sanford's extraordinary admission of an extramarital affair with an Argentine woman.

The best I've heard so far -- from a friend who's a former journalist with two decades' experience in newsrooms -- is a play on the Argentina (and thus Evita Peron) connection: "He Cried for Her in Argentina."

Most readers (and an unforgivably large number of political operatives), aren't aware that in most newspapers, headlines aren't written by the reporters who write the stories. They're not even written by their editors. In most newspapers, headlines are written by brilliant people whose only job is to find ways to shrink complex story lines into six-word grabbers.

My favorite tabloid headline of all time was the one that ran over a story about a decapitated body found in a gentleman's club: "Headless Body in Topless Bar."

Mark Sanford isn't the first major American politician to become entangled with an "exotic" Argentine woman.

On October 7, 1974, two U.S. Park Police patrolmen pulled over a limousine at 2 AM. The car had been barreling down Independence Avenue, between the Jefferson Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial, at 80 miles per hour with its headlights off.

Inside, they found a powerful member of Congress, a man who just two years earlier had competed for the Democratic nomination for the presidency -- Rep. Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

My instant analysis:

What South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford looked like upon his return from Argentina and the revelation of his activities there. Click here

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