Mark Sanford joins Fox News as a political analyst

Mark Sanford's extramarital affair effectively ended his political career, but the former South Carolina governor will still play a prominent role in the 2012 campaign—on television at least.

Per the New York Times' Jim Rutenberg, Sanford is joining Fox News as a paid on-air political analyst.

Sanford had been a rising star in the Republican Party and was even once considered a frontrunner for the 2012 presidential nomination.

But in June 2009, he was caught up in a very public cheating scandal, after it was discovered that he had misled his staff about going on a hiking trip along the Appalachian Trail when in fact he had flown to Argentina to rendezvous with his mistress.

Sanford and his wife, Jenny, later divorced, but his relationship with Maria Belén Chapur, an Argentine journalist with whom he had cheated, is still going on.

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