South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford gestures as he talks during an interview in his Columbia, S.C., Statehouse office on Tuesday.

Columbia, S.C. ? When South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford flew to Argentina to visit his lover on June 18, he knew it was the end of his carefully scripted life.

It was the end of his rock-star status as top fundraiser in the Republican Party. The end of inside-the-beltway rumors that he would be a legitimate candidate for the 2012 GOP nomination. And, most likely, the end of his 20-year marriage.

“I was frightened and I was scared, and I knew the consequences,” he said. “This was a whole lot more than a simple affair. This was a love story. A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day.”

That love story would lead to Sanford’s personal unraveling. During two days of exclusive interviews in his Statehouse office with The Associated Press, Sanford revealed painfully intimate details about his life, saying he needed to lay out the facts.

Often wiping tears from his eyes, Sanford dropped bombshell after bombshell: He isn’t in love with his wife; he had “crossed the lines” with other women; and, perhaps the biggest of all, his mistress, Maria Belen Chapur, is his “soul mate.”

“I don’t have much to lose now,” said Sanford, sighing and describing the scandal as “his political funeral.”

Blowing off steam

The father of four boys hasn’t always been a ladies’ man. Quite the contrary: Associates have called him “asexual.”

Sanford is well-known around the capital for his love of charts and graphs. The three-term U.S. congressman and two-term governor describes himself as “methodical” and “left-brained.”

But he also admits that he kept his emotions “in a box” and that once a year, he and his guy friends would go on a trip to “let steam out of the box.”

At home, the governor avoided going to bars and clubs, rigidly “avoiding even the appearance of evil.” But during these trips — mainly overseas adventures to exotic locales — he would have casual encounters with women.

On some of those trips, Sanford said he “crossed the lines” with a handful of women.

“I’m quite certain that there were a handful of instances wherein I crossed the lines I shouldn’t have crossed as a married man, but never crossed the ultimate line,” he said. “I didn’t cross the sex line.”

Meeting Chapur

In January 2001, Sanford took another trip with a buddy, this time to Punta del Este, an exclusive seaside resort in Uruguay. He described going to a club on a “windswept beach” and seeing two women at the edge of the dance floor. One of the women was Chapur; he said he approached her and they began talking.

The connection was instantaneous.

Chapur confided to this stranger that her marriage was failing. Sanford says he advised her to reconcile with her husband, for the good of her two sons and for the sake of “God’s law.”

Sanford said there was no physical contact between them during that trip. But at the end of their conversation, they exchanged e-mail addresses.

Sanford returned to the U.S. and began his campaign for governor that same year. He won office in 2002 and began making his mark as a charismatic Republican governor.

Chapur was never far from his mind — or e-mail inbox. Sanford insists the correspondence was innocent, but he admits that he didn’t tell his wife about his pen pal.

The two e-mailed “sporadically” over the years. In 2004, during the Republican National Convention, they met for coffee at a French cafe in New York City.

“It was like catching up with a great, old friend,” he said. “I remember there was an older couple sitting to our right, and I remember them watching us, in the way that we interacted. They could see a spark.”

Sanford’s affair

The spark turned into a blaze in June 2008.

Sanford was part of a state economic development mission to Brazil and Argentina. It was during that trip, he said, that the relationship became physical.

Sanford and Chapur arranged to meet again, three months later, in New York City. Two months later, they met again in New York and spent a few days in the Hamptons.

Just before Christmas, a frantic Chapur called Sanford: Someone had hacked into her e-mail account and discovered their missives. Politically, Sanford was at the top of his game: He had been elected chairman of the Republican Governors Association and there was talk of him running for the presidential nomination in 2012.

About a month later, Jenny Sanford, his wife of 20 years, discovered one of his letters to Chapur.

“She was visibly shaken,” Sanford said about his wife’s reaction.

The troubled couple began Christian couples counseling. One friend suggested that Sanford needed to break it off quickly.

But Sanford couldn’t do it.

“Rightly or wrongly, this person had come to be a dear friend,” he said.

He asked his wife for permission to say goodbye to Chapur face to face. She refused, but then relented when a trusted spiritual adviser agreed to act as chaperone for a meeting between Sanford and Chapur.

Sanford, his spiritual mentor and Chapur met in New York in early February. They attended a church service and went to dinner.

“Plenty of tears,” is how Sanford described the goodbye.

‘A mirage’

In the following months, Sanford tried to work on his marriage — and threw himself into work.

He was the leading voice criticizing the various bailout and stimulus plans as pork-laden boondoggles. In March, Sanford rejected $700 million in stimulus money to plug budget holes after the Obama administration twice rebuffed his requests to instead use the money to pay down state debt.

All that time, Sanford was still secretly corresponding with Chapur.

“I don’t want to blow up my time in politics,” he said. “I don’t want to blow up my future earning power. I don’t want to blow up the kids’ lives. I don’t want to blow up 20 years that we’ve invested. But if I’m completely honest, there are still feelings in the way.”

Sanford and his wife started a trial separation. On June 18, the legislative session over, Sanford slipped the shackles of public life and flew to Argentina without telling anyone or checking in with his staff.

For four days, he remained incommunicado while he decided whether Chapur and Argentina were to be his future.

“I got down on one knee and said, ‘I am here in the hope that we can prove this whole thing to be a mirage,'” he said.

Sanford said his feelings for Chapur were real. Whether her feelings were mutual, he refused to say on the record.

But to him, it doesn’t really matter.

“I will be able to die knowing that I had met my soul mate.”