Gov. Mark Sanford, it turns out, is considering selling Santee Cooper, our state-owned power company. That's one of the reasons behind the controversial Credit Suisse First Boston appraisal of the company. The Charleston Post & Courier confirmed these facts last week in a news story grounded in the contract with Credit Suisse and an interview with former Santee Cooper board Chairman Graham Edwards.

For several months now, Sanford and those who speak for him steadfastly have insisted that they pressured the Santee Cooper board to conduct the appraisal only to learn what the utility is worth. The appraisal, they have insisted, was not a first step toward finding a private buyer for the company.

Folks in the Santee Cooper service area - Horry, Georgetown and Berkeley counties - enjoy relatively low electric rates and are not anxious to see Santee Cooper sold. So they'll be unhappy that privatizing the company is on Sanford's radar screen. So will customers of the S.C. electric cooperatives that buy wholesale power from Santee Cooper.

For Sanford, the timing of this revelation could not have been worse. It comes as the General Assembly prepares to debate bills aimed at reducing the power of the governor to appoint board members and to fire them at will, as happened last year with Edwards.

Sanford makes valid objections to some of the changes under legislative consideration, such as packing the Santee Cooper board with board members from the electric cooperatives. He argues - persuasively - that the governor should be free to pick board members who best represent the interest of the public, and to weed out board members who fall short of expectations.

Now, we fear, his objections will fall on deaf legislative ears because his bully-pulpit powers on this issue will be negated.

South Carolinians like owning Santee Cooper.

What we have here is a classic object lesson in how duplicity can erode a promising political career. If Sanford had just admitted, when the question first arose, that he has contemplated privatization, he wouldn't be in a morally inferior position on this issue.

Even though he never exactly lied about the matter, he looks Clintonesque for having obscured the truth - not a good place for one who aspires to a second term or higher office to be.