This is the best you've got, South Carolina?

Stephen Colbert's sister and Mark Sanford. Really, South Carolina?

You've blessed the country conservative heavyweights such as Jim DeMint, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott, so I was willing to overlook the fact that you've simultaneously saddled us with Lindsey Graham. But now, you have another opportunity to send a conservative representative to Congress and you're narrowing the field down to a battle between a Democrat and a Republican governor whose... er, extracurricular activities redefined the "Appalachian Trail"?

USA Today reports on the sad state of politics in South Carolina these days:

The Republican side featured 16 candidates, including a philandering politician trying to make a comeback (Sanford), the son of a media mogul making his first bid for office (Teddy Turner), and assorted current or former officeholders.

South Carolina voters won't decide who replaces Scott, now an appointed member of the U.S. Senate, until May 7. Here are five takeaways from the primaries held Tuesday in South Carolina's 1st Congressional District.

Apparently the voters of South Carolina believe in forgiveness -- Sanford is the current front-runner going into the April 2 runoff.  But there's still hope for a more principled pick: more than 60% of the GOP votes in the primary were split among 15 other candidates.   But if Sanford does clinch the GOP nomination, the state's First Congressional District could go to Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch.

"I would predict to you if [the nominee]'s Mark Sanford, the Democratic committee will pour money into the race and make him the narrative," Katon Dawson, a former state Republican Party chairman told USA Today. "He built the narrative on forgiveness and redemption and then had to pivot to his conservative record as a congressman and governor."

It's not that I don't believe in forgiveness.  I think Sanford's transgressions are issues to be resolved between himself, his family and God.  But in my mind, his return to politics wreaks of opportunism.  Right or wrong, it seems like upon entering the real world after leaving politics in disgrace the first time around, Sanford realized he didn't have the skills or wherewithal to do anything else.  As an outsider looking in, he seems like one of those politicians who only know how to be a politician -- and that's not the sort of guy I'd personally want representing me in Washington.