In the contest of scandalized governors, Mark Sanford has a clear edge over Eliot Spitzer. South Carolina's governor really had a thing going on that went beyond the physical: His Argentine lover, Maria, suggested in one of her emails that Marky Mark read Alan Greenspan's The Age of Turbulence.

A girlfriend who takes a Greenspan autobiography to read on the beach — what's better than that?! It's clear that Mark and Maria had more scintillating conversations than New York governor Spitzer's negotiations with his hookers about the price of a blowjob.

But maybe Sanford should have read the Greenspan memoir before he started sparkin' with the woman since identified as Maria Belen Chapur.

At the very least, Sanford should have recalled that Greenspan famously raised the question of "irrational exuberance" way back in 1996. (Read about it in Gideon Haigh's excellent 2007 review of the Greenspan memoir here.)

In any case, the Guardian's Ewen MacAskill perfectly captured the tone of the Sanford affair (the affair about the affair) when he wrote that the "story has knocked the upheaval in Iran off the top news spot in the US, with the emails being read out by po-faced television anchors and political correspondents." ("Po-faced," derived from the French for toilet, means "piously or hypocritically solemn.")

Plenty of po-faced people swirling around this affair — Gawker's John Cook isn't one of them; he actually exhibits a sense of humor while charting the "million monkeys Googling" the name of Sanford's lover.

Sanford himself — an early critic of fellow horndog Bill Clinton's "moral legitimacy" — leads the po-faced parade, closely followed by 99 percent of all commentators and the remaining 1 percent of weak jokesters.

Sanford stood for the sanctity of hetero marriage, while abandoning his boys on Father's Day weekend so he could screw the pooch in Argentina. All Spitzer did was vigorously prosecute prostitutes while using them on the side. On the other hand, Spitzer dragged his wife on stage to try to spin his mortification. What's more po-faced than that?