We had our stock political sex-scandal editorial all but ready to go when South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford admitted last week to committing adultery with Maria Belen Chapur, a sultry South American television reporter now destined to be dubbed the Argentine Firecracker II (See Mills, Wilbur D., Dem.-Ark.).

The thing had been written for months, with blank spaces in which to insert the name, office and political party of the randy politico.

There were paragraphs that could be left in or deleted according to the circumstances: the hypocrisy paragraph for Bible-thumping Republicans; the “Slick Willie” references for unrepentant Democrats; the crocodile-tears apology, coming only after getting caught; the politically correct “not-that-there’s-anything-wrong-with-being-gay” disclaimer should the dalliance fall into that category.

It was a nice piece of work, if we do say so ourselves. We had whipped it up after the John Edwards imbroglio, and it had been hanging in our editorial closet ever since, nicely pressed and ready for any minor alterations that needed to be applied.

It seemed at first that it would be a perfect fit for Sanford with only a few minor alterations. He owned up to the affair only after getting caught, and he had, as a congressman during the Clinton administration, waxed indignant at the president’s sexual peccadilloes. He vowed to repair his marriage to his wife, and his relationship with his four sons.

We had just about flicked the last bit of lint off the prepackaged bit of editorial harrumphing when Sanford began to veer off, slowly but irrevocably, into The Twilight Zone.

He is deep in it now for good and all, and we don’t know if he will ever find his muddled way out.

We should have known something was wrong when Sanford ran on at length at his initial press conference. He seemed to want to talk more about his affair than even his harshest critics wanted to hear.

Then, he addressed his cabinet the next day, and things began getting really strange.

He compared himself to King David, the well-known biblical canoodler, and even suggested that the whole messy affair might end up being a good example for his four sons, teaching them to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and start all over again if they are ever laid low by circumstances. (“When the going gets tough, the tough pull up their pants and get going.”)

Then came the now-infamous interview with The Associated Press, and we all followed him down the rabbit hole.

He sounded like one of those syrupy old Bobby Goldsboro records as he droned on and on about his Argentine inamorata: “This was a whole lot more than a simple affair; this was a love story — a forbidden and tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day.”

On his last day on earth, he told the gobsmacked AP reporter, he would die “knowing that I had met my soul mate.”

We are not sure how any of this is going to help Sanford patch things up with his wife, as he insists he plans to do, nor do we know how he will be helped in that effort by his admission to the AP reporter that he had “crossed the lines that I shouldn’t have crossed” with several other women, though he had “never crossed the ultimate line,” whatever that means.

Sanford was still insisting Thursday afternoon that he intended to remain in office, despite the advice and counsel of just about every other Republican in and outside of South Carolina that he shut up and get out of Dodge.

He sees nothing but images of reconciliation with his wife and family, completion of his term in the governor’s office and the beautiful story of himself and his soul mate.

They are all there in another dimension — a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.

We have already passed the signpost; we are well and truly in The Twilight Zone.