Somewhere, Dr Pangloss is laughing.

A big day for Governor Mark Sanford- The Hill's Blog Briefing Room had no fewer than five links to Sanford's circumlocutions on the stimulus money.

The one worth reading, however, is Thomas Frank's Wall Street Journal op-ed, in which he portrays Sanford as Candide:

Mark Sanford, the Republican governor of South Carolina, is the conservative of the moment. For months he has been the object of national attention thanks to his refusal to accept a portion of funds set aside for his state in the $787 billion stimulus package. Conservatives love him: Here is another brave South Carolina nullifier, putting high principle before low, craven politics.

Mr. Sanford sees nothing unusual about his stand. "I've got a 15-year pattern of doing exactly this kind of thing," he said last month.

I would go even farther: The man has probably been waiting his entire career for the chance to conspicuously turn down federal money.

Mr. Sanford got his political start with the famous Republican "freshmen" of 1994, who came to Congress in a blaze of idealism determined to hack down the big-government leviathan. Virtuous self-denial was the flavor of the moment, in contrast to the supposedly indulgent Democratic Congress the young zealots had toppled, and Mr. Sanford was perhaps the most austere of them all.

In his account of those years, "The Trust Committed to Me," Mr. Sanford details the perks he gave up. We learn how the congressman slept on a futon in his office rather than take an apartment in Washington. How he gave his pay raise to charity. How he managed to halt ice delivery to congressional offices.

The great cause of those days was term limits, which Mr. Sanford understood as a kind of silver bullet that would end the age of big, interventionist government once and for all. Mr. Sanford adopted term limits voluntarily -- he was "self-limiting," in his revealing phrase -- retiring after three terms, even as the term-limit movement fizzled.

The greatest paragons of selflessness, though, were those representatives who would not grub for their district's share of federal money -- refusing to fight for highway bills or to resist base closings -- because they understood that government spending was reprehensible. "I didn't see pork delivery as my legislative mission," he writes, recounting an argument from his first campaign. "We all had to make sacrifices if we were going to fix the mess the political class had saddled us with."

In his book, Mr. Sanford denounces politicians whose "egos [grew] like kudzu," deprecates campaign workers who wanted jobs in Washington, and even suspects the motives of old friends who phoned to express their pride in him.

It would be easy to criticize Mr. Sanford for hypocrisy. After all, the man fairly boasts about his humility -- behold the futon of virtue, voter!

Besides, his war against "career politicians" has obviously been the fuel for . . . a career in politics.

Worst of all, his stand against the stimulus, while self-denying in the Sanford tradition, was taken against the loud protests of less spartan citizens. Mr. Sanford's desire to strike his bold moral pose took priority over his state's need for relief.

I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. His ideals are honestly held. It's just that with ideals this bad, you don't need hypocrisy to go wrong.

Mr. Sanford is transfixed, for example, by the perfidy of big government. Deficit spending, the issue of the day, has always struck him as fantastically evil, and in his congressional period he even quoted an early 19th century Scottish theorist on why government spending can force a democracy to collapse. Social Security is another bad idea, he argues in his book, and it needs to be replaced by personal retirement accounts.

Business, on the other hand, is an institution with almost magical powers of beneficence: were we to entrust our retirement savings to "conventional investments" instead of government, Mr. Sanford wrote in 2000, we could expect returns of 8% a year. (And that's why the Dow stands well above 20,000 today.)

Mr. Sanford's theory of how government works -- it's a conflict of "citizen legislators" and "career politicians," with the city of Washington itself exerting a mysterious liberal influence over all who enter it -- would have been considered touchingly naïve even in the days of the Harding administration.

Besides, a "citizen legislator" in a hair shirt is an American stock figure every bit as phony and pretentious as a self-important senator being ferried about in an Air Force jet. Think of William Henry Harrison, propelled to the White House in 1840 in a gust of log-cabin-and-hard-cider folksiness. Or of down-home Huey Long. Or of the amazing succession of fake cowboys and pseudo-populists who have presided over Washington in the past 30-odd years. And now compare those politicians' aw-shucks ways with the massive concentration of wealth they engineered.

Mr. Sanford's democratic idealism may be for real, but it is also -- in its ignorance of what actually goes on in the world -- what made America into the least virtuous, least equal country it has been in many years.