After a week of cover ups, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford confessed Wednesday that he hasn't really been away hiking the Appalachian Trail as his staff had told reporters. Instead, he admitted in a nationally televised press conference, he was shacked up in South America with his Argentinian paramour.

Sanford earlier had told a reporter for the State newspaper of Columbia, S.C., that he'd planned to go hiking but then changed his mind and decided to go to Argentina because "I wanted to do something exotic."

In the press conference he admitted he was "doing" a woman with whom he's been having an affair for the past year.

Sanford, who is married, had been considered a potential Republican presidential candidate in 2012.