As a native and current resident of South Carolina, I’m sick and tired of people talking about the embarrassment Gov. Mark Sanford has brought to the state through his affair of the heart with Maria Chapur.

Embarrassment? The governor’s philandering down in Argentina — at the extreme Southern end of the Appalachian Trail — has thrust the state into a limelight that even the epochal death of Michael Jackson could not dim.

We South Carolinians aren’t used to being at center stage. The last time the national attention was focused so intensely on our state was in 1861, when our forefathers thumbed their noses at Ol’ Abe and fired on Fort Sumter.

We inhabit a small state — the smallest in the old Confederacy. We’re even the smaller, by far, of the two Carolinas.

My grammar school South Carolina history book often pointed out that our state was the leader in many significant categories “in proportion to population.” I can still recall the pride in the voice of my sixth-grade teacher, Miss Catherine McLeod, as she told us: “South Carolina had more Congressional Medal of Honor winners in proportion to population than any other state in World War I. Just think: Little ol’ South Carolina!”

Whenever I would get a new textbook in any subject, I would always go to the index and look for references to South Carolina. I seldom found more than two or three mentions, but I treasured them all.

We don’t have rich sources of mineral wealth. There’s no oil or coal or commercial gold deposits beneath our soil. Our most abundant mineral is kaolin, the white clay left here eons ago when the ocean reached up to the Fall Line. We grow a lot of peaches, but Georgia has purloined the title of “Peach State.” We grow tobacco, but North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee grow more.

We are not the mother of presidents. That honor falls to our rich confederate, Virginia. The only president from South Carolina was Andrew Jackson, and our sister state of North Carolina disputes our claim to him. Anyhow, Old Hickory won his political spurs in Tennessee. And when push came to shove, he opposed our forefathers on the issue of nullification and threatened to hang John C. Calhoun — our patron saint — if he didn’t back down. The last native South Carolinian to seek the presidency was John Edwards, and even he migrated to North Carolina to make his fortune. So he fornicated with a campaign staffer while his wife was in remission from cancer. So what? Does that come anywhere close to the perfidy of defending the protective tariff imposed by greedy Yankees decades before the South needed it to protect its textile industry?

We don’t have a great athletic tradition — no Crimson Tide and no War Eagle. The NFL’s Carolina Panthers play in Charlotte, which is barely in North Carolina. Our favorite baseball team is the Atlanta Braves, way over in Georgia. Our flagship university recruits great coaches but can’t come up with great seasons, so we’re left to brag about how we scare the pants off the tough guys and occasionally upset one of them. The perennial college basketball power is the other Carolina. Our greatest baseball hero — Shoeless Joe Jackson — was permanently banned from the sport when he was accused of conniving to throw the 1919 World Series. Our greatest football hero, a guy named Doc Blanchard, won his fame up North, playing for West Point. The most memorable recent athlete from our state was a guy named Refrigerator Perry, a Clemson player who joined the Chicago Bears and, to the best of my knowledge, still holds the record for the largest finger ever to sport a Super Bowl ring. And to think, the Fridge is from Little Ol’ South Carolina.

But we have produced some colorful political figures. There was James L. Pettigru, the unionist judge who in 1860 pronounced the state “too small to be a country and too large to be an insane asylum.” There was Preston Brooks, the antebellum South Carolina congressman, who took his sturdy cane to the Senate floor and beat Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, within an inch of his life. There was Benjamin Tillman, the one-eyed governor and later U.S. senator, who won the epithet “Pitchfork Ben” by threatening to go to the White House and poke President Grover Cleveland with a pitchfork.

And of course, there was Strom Thurmond, who during his lusty youth, sired a child by a family domestic and in his lusty old age married and reared a family with the former Miss South Carolina. In between those achievements, he made it to the pages of Life magazine by standing on his head while serving as governor, ran for president on the Dixiecrat ticket, staged a one-man filibuster against a 1957 civil-rights bill, and engaged in a wrestling match with Sen. Ralph Yarborough of Texas, who tried to drag him to a committee meeting to consider civil-rights legislation. Even George Wallace’s stand in the schoolhouse door couldn’t top that.

So Mark Sanford’s sweet nothings to Maria in cyberland are no embarrassment to the state. In fact, they display an eloquence we weren’t accustomed to seeing in his political statements. And they returned us effectively and poetically to center stage.

As the governor pointed out to his Bible Belt constituents, what he did was no more terrible than what King David did when he sent Uriah the Hittite to his death after the royal bedding of Uriah’s wife, Bath-Sheba.

I understand, though, that in agonizing over whether to resign or hang tough; whether to surrender to his heart and fly back to Maria or surrender to morality and patch up his marriage to Jenny, the governor was visited in a dream by the prophet Nathan, who told him: “I knew King David. King David was a friend of mine. And governor, you’re no King David.”

Readers may write Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625, or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@AOL.com