OK, that's really what you would expect someone to say about a rival if they were trying to win an interview from, say, a southern state governor who's gone missing and, at the time, no one knows why.

You have to wonder, however, what Gov. Mark Sanford's press secretary, Joel Sawyer, thought as it became clear even from the media e-mails promising a sympathetic ear that Sanford's walk in the woods had become a huge problem.

Some of the media e-mails were published this morning by McClatchy's The State newspaper. The paper got them in response to an open records request. You can read a few of the e-mails here. For the story, go here.

In one, ABC's White House correspondent Jake Tapper tries to show how mean rival NBC was being to the governor when he passed along Meet the Press host David Gregory's "tweet" on Sanford: David Gregory of NBC just tweeted: Fm first read re Gov. Sanford: U should be concerned if "your wife say(s) she doesn't know where you are but isn't concerned"

Sawyer's response, if any, isn't known, but you can imagine what he was thinking, and it wasn't about calling Tapper to give him the exclusive, even if Tapper 23 minutes earlier had sent Sawyer the transcript of that morning's TODAY show, with the subject line "NBC spot was slimy."

The next day Sanford surfaced and, prompted by news The State had e-mails between Sanford and his Argentine lover, confessed. Slimy, indeed.