The web team here at Crikey spend a large part of our day reading newspapers, magazines, journals and blogs from around the world in order to find the articles and analysis we think our readers will enjoy. This often involves exercising our good judgment on what overseas news is and isn’t interesting to an Australian audience. To wit, just because we follow American politics with all the passion and squealing delight of a teenage girl’s Robert Pattinson obsession, it doesn’t mean you all share in our Yankee-focused wonky ways.

On Tuesday, corners of the US media started to bubble with the story that the Republican governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford, hadn’t been seen for a few days and no-one — including his wife — knew where he’d gone. A wacky little yarn, we thought, but probably not so interesting to readers that it was worth passing on. I mean, have you ever even heard of Sanford before? Would you really care where he’d gone? We hadn’t and we didn’t, so we let it go through to the keeper — but we filed it in the back of our brains as one to keep an eye on in case he turned up dead. Politicians are often more interesting dead than alive.

Between Utegate and Iran, it didn’t register again on our news radar until later in the day, when reports started to come through that Sanford was just out hiking, and  the whole thing looked like a bit of a non-story.

But sometime last night, things looked slightly more interesting, as the Governor returned to his office, claiming he hadn’t been out hiking at all, but had rather been in Argentina — “I wanted to do something exotic,” he told the press… without, presumably, wanting to tell his wife or office about it. Now, this is news over this side of the pond, though mainly because Sanford’s name had been bandied around a bit as a potential 2012 Presidential candidate, and this odd-ball behaviour (and the subsequent press it had attracted) put a damper on any real chance he had.

But then came the big twist. The kind of twist that makes newsfolk so excited they wee in their pants just a little bit. A sexy twist:

Sanford held a tear-filled, emotional press conference early this morning our time, where he admitted his trip to Argentina was to engage in an extramarital affair.

Now we have a story: mystery, deception, politics and some Latin lovin’ — made even better by the fact that another Republican Presidential hopeful was also caught out cheating earlier this week.

Since the presser, it has come out that his wife had actually left him two weeks ago, while The State has come out with copies of emails between Sanford and his lover — emails they’ve had since December.

Where did they get them? Why did they sit on them?

And will Sanford resign as Governor?

We’ll keep you updated as this great story unfolds further.