Weird politics: Hold on, did he just say that?

Wait a minute, back up. There's the Democratic governor of New Jersey, the father of two daughters, standing next to his attractive wife, giving a televised press conference. Something must be wrong with the sound. Did he just use the word "gay"? In the first person?

Yes, he did. "My truth is that I am a gay American," said Jim McGreevey, who with one sentence opened a public relations nightmare and simultaneously became the first openly homosexual governor in U.S. history — until he resigned in disgrace three months later. "I engaged in an adult consensual affair with another man," McGreevey stunningly admitted in 2004. And the man had been appointed by McGreevey as the state's national security adviser, a position for which he had no experience.

McGreevey was not the first politician to deliver a jaw-dropping career bomb on live television. Remember New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and the prostitutes, Idaho Sen. Larry Craig and the undercover police officer in the airport men's room, even Richard Nixon in the 1960s throwing a temper tantrum because he lost the California governor's race by a landslide.

On Wednesday, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford became the club's newest member, explaining to a press conference at the state capital, and to afternoon cable viewers around the country, that he really hadn't been hiking the Appalachian Trail for the past week. Actually, he'd secretly flown to Argentina to visit his mistress, with whom he'd broken up.

And, his wife Jenny added later through a prepared statement, Sanford had been kicked out of the house.

"I was crying in Argentina," Sanford said. Yes, he really said that. And went on to say a whole lot more, unwinding a string of cringe-inducing details that didn't help matters. "I met this person eight years ago very innocently," he explained. "We struck up a conversation. I am not justifying. What I did was wrong. We ended up in a conversation about why she should get back with her husband. We had an incredibly earnest conversation. At the end of it, we swapped e-mails. It began on just a casual basis."

The TV pundits shook their heads. The blogosphere piled on. Most comments were variations on a theme — resurrecting the immortal words of Jay Leno, who in 1995 turned to actor Hugh Grant, recently arrested for soliciting a sexual act with a hooker in a rented BMW, and asked the question that summed it all up:

"What the hell were you thinking?"

Apparently, not a lot of thinking was going on.

Spitzer, New York's former governor, had created a careful public image of being tough on crime and corruption. Nonetheless, he stood before reporters last year and announced he'd done things that hurt his family and his wife, and that he was very sorry.

"I have acted in a way that violates my obligation to my family and violates my or any sense of right or wrong," said Spitzer, who appeared with his wife. "I apologize first and most importantly to my family. I apologize to the public to whom I promised better."

What he didn't say was that agents had allegedly caught the governor, also the state's former attorney general, on a federal wiretap soliciting prostitutes. He later resigned.

Larry Craig stood under a bright Idaho sky in 2007, flanked by his wife, who was wearing big sunglasses and never said a word, and announced, "Let me be clear. I am not gay. I never have been gay." But he had already pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct when arrested by an undercover police officer in the men's restroom at an airport in Minnesota.

The male officer said Craig had pushed his foot under the stall and tapped the undercover cop's shoe — code for soliticing sexual acts. Craig blamed the encounter on his "wide stance" while using the bathroom.

"I chose to plead guilty to a lesser charge in the hope of making it all go away," Craig said at his news conference. The incident had occurred two months earlier, but didn't become public until a local newspaper learned of the arrest.

Former president Richard Nixon had more than one public meltdown at a press conference, but arguably the most notable was in 1962, when he failed to defeat California Gov. Pat Brown by 300,000 votes. This was little more than two years after his sweaty television appearance while debating John F. Kennedy was perceived to be part of the reason many voters disliked him.

"You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore," he petulantly told the assembled journalists. "Because gentlemen, this is my last press conference."