Rep. Mark Sanford (R), the former governor of South Carolina, announced in a very long post on Facebook that he is breaking off his engagement with Maria Belen Chapur, the Argentine woman at the heart of an extramarital affair that led to the highly public dissolution of Sanford's marriage in 2009.
Sanford suggested that his former wife, Jenny Sanford, was to blame for threatening lawsuits that had forced him to choose between his sons and his fiancée. "No relationship can stand forever this tension of being forced to pick between the one you love and your own son or daughter, and for this reason Belen and I have decided to call off the engagement," he wrote.
Sanford's affair was famously outed when he mysteriously disappeared from the governor's mansion for about a week in June of 2009. He later claimed to be hiking the Appalachian Trail, when in fact he had rendezvoused with Chapur in Buenos Aires. Sanford later tearfully declared that Chapur was his "soulmate."
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