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As a native and current resident of South Carolina, I'm sick and tired of people talking about the embarrassment Gov. Mark Sanford has caused the state through his affair of the heart with Maria Chapur.

Embarrassment? The governor's philandering down in Argentina -- at the extreme Southern end of the Appalachian Trail -- has thrust the state into a limelight that even the epochal death of Michael Jackson could not dim. The last time the national attention was focused so intensely on our state was in 1861, when our forefathers fired on Fort Sumter.

We hunger for the limelight. We're a small state -- the smallest in the old Confederacy. In every locale west of the Savannah River and north of the Grand Strand, we're the Other Carolina. North Carolina has more land, more mountains, more people and a cluster of universities and research facilities that places it among the academic and high-tech elite. We have Clemson .

My grammar-school South Carolina history book often pointed out that our state was the leader in many significant categories "in proportion to population."

"Just think: Little Ol' South Carolina!" Miss Catherine McLeod would exclaim to her sixth-grade pupils as she revealed that our state had more Congressional Medal of Honor winners in proportion to population than any other state in World War I.

We don't have rich sources of mineral wealth. There's no oil or coal or commercial gold deposits beneath our soil. We grow a lot of peaches, but Georgia has purloined the title of "Peach State." We grow tobacco, but North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee grow more.

We are not the mother of presidents. The only president from South Carolina was Andrew Jackson, and big ol' North Carolina disputes our claim to him. Anyhow, Old Hickory won his political spurs in Tennessee. And when push came to shove, he opposed our forefathers on the issue of nullification and threatened to hang John C. Calhoun -- our patron saint -- if he didn't back down. The last native South Carolinian to seek the presidency was John Edwards, and even he migrated to North Carolina to make his fortune.

We don't have a great athletic tradition. The NFL's Carolina Panthers play in Charlotte. In baseball, our "home team" plays in Atlanta. Our flagship university recruits great coaches but can't come up with great seasons, so we're left to brag about how we scare the pants off the tough guys and occasionally upset one of them.

The perennial college basketball power is the other Carolina. Our greatest baseball hero -- Shoeless Joe Jackson -- was permanently banned from the sport after the "Black Sox" scandal of 1919.

Until Sanford, our colorful political figures were all in the past. There was James L. Pettigru, the unionist judge who in 1860 pronounced the state "too small to be a country and too large to be an insane asylum."

There was Preston Brooks, the antebellum South Carolina congressman, who took his sturdy cane to the Senate floor and beat Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, within an inch of his life.

There was Benjamin Tillman, the one-eyed governor and later U.S. Senator, who won the epithet "Pitchfork Ben" by threatening to go to the White House and poke President Grover Cleveland with a pitchfork.

And of course, there was Strom Thurmond, who during his lusty youth, sired a child by a family domestic and in his lusty old age married and reared a family with the former Miss South Carolina. In between those achievements, he ran for president on the Dixiecrat ticket, staged a one-man filibuster against a 1957 civil-rights bill, and engaged in a wrestling match with Sen. Ralph Yarborough of Texas, who tried to drag him to a committee meeting to consider civil-rights legislation. Strom has been dead for six years, so it's about time somebody came along to rekindle the torch.

Mark Sanford's e-mailed sweet nothings to Maria are no embarrassment to the state. In fact, they display an eloquence we weren't accustomed to seeing in his political statements. Heck, some network may even base a soap opera on his Argentine odyssey. "The Sanford Affair?" That'll keep Little Ol' South Carolina at center stage.

As the governor pointed out to his Bible Belt constituents, what he did was no more terrible than what King David did when he sent Uriah the Hittite to his death after the royal bedding of Uriah's wife, Bath-Sheba.

I understand, though, that in agonizing over whether to resign or hang tough, whether to surrender to his heart and fly back to Maria or surrender to morality and patch up his marriage to Jenny, the governor was visited in a dream by the prophet Nathan, who told him:

"I knew King David. King David was a friend of mine. And governor, you're no King David."

Yeah, but all King David had was a harp and the book of Psalms. Mark Sanford has the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, cable TV, and the broadcast networks to spread his fame.

Readers may write to Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625, or e-mail him at Swampscum2@aol.com.