The worst of it is, the primary won't make the story go away

Like The Dew isn't much impressed by the SC GOP governor's race:

When South Carolina Republicans go to the polls on Tuesday to nominate a party candidate for governor, many of them will be choosing between State Rep. Nikki Haley, a Lexington account executive, and Will Folks, a political consultant who isn’t on the ballot but has mounted a campaign to prove he had sex with Haley.

Nikki Haley and Will Folks

Folks has done most of his campaigning on his popular political website,FITSnews.com.  Most recently, Folks, who served as Gov. Mark Sanford’s press secretary from 2001 to 2005, released a log of 700 telephone calls he says were between him and Haley in 2007, when he alleges the “affair” occurred, including one call that began at 2:24 a.m. and lasted more than two hours.  Before that, Folks posted nearly 100 recent text messages, including one from Jim Davenport of The Associated Press asking, “What is this stuff about ur having an affair with Nikki Haley?”  Folks claims it was information that the media were on to his “inappropriate physical relationship” with Haley that prompted him to take “preemptive” steps to publicize the “affair” himself.

But Nikki Haley, who has been endorsed by Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney and Gov. Sanford’s immediate past wife, Jenny Sanford,  claims the only person she has had sex with the past 13 years is her husband, Michael Haley, father of her two children.  She calls the accusations “disgusting politics.”

But, wait, it gets more disgusting.  Larry Marchant, a campaign consultant for Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, one of Nikki Haley’s opponents, suddenly remembered he, too, had had sex with Haley.  Marchant told The State newspaper that it was a one-night stand during a June 2008 school-choice convention in Salt Lake City.  Bauer, who gained notoriety for comparing welfare families to stray animals and blaming illegal immigration on “flat-out lazy” Americans, announced Wednesday that Marchant had resigned.  “Whether it happened or not, I don’t want to be associated with that,” Bauer told the Post and Courier.

Bauer is dealing with sex issues of his own, dispatching political friends to deny rumors that he is gay.  Among those helping circulate those rumors, apparently started byblogactive.com, a website known for outing gay Republicans, is Will Folks.  Folks says Bauer is blaming Gov. Mark Sanford for the rumors.

Who’s telling the truth in all this?  Perhaps nobody.