Gov. Mark Sanford has one final chance to be the kind of leader he long argued he was.

He can officially end his apology tour and begin a tour of redemption.

To do so, he'd have to take his cue from the S.C. Ethics Commission, which found that he broke state law 37 times for travel and improper use of campaign funds. Some of those violations are related to an overseas trip that included a secret tryst with his Argentine lover.

This is his final chance to resign and save South Carolina a lot of time, money and energy next year, all of which would be better spent trying to put more South Carolinians back to work and handling budget priorities in a recovering but not-yet-recovered economy so further cuts won't harm agencies charged with protecting the most vulnerable among us.

He can demonstrate real leadership by telling the people of South Carolina that the state is more important than one man, and that if his actions go unpunished, the precedent would drop the bar so low that no future governor would ever expect to be thrown out of office short of murder or something akin to it.

He can say he did the best he could, but that he's human like the rest of us, that he made mistakes.

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