Because, of course, Mark Sanford was simply the hapless soldier, stuck in a minefield (on the Appalachian Trail, probably):
Indeed, while Jenny has never come out and publicly opposed Mark’s congressional candidacy — choosing to remain officially neutral — she’s waged a brutally effective passive-aggressive campaign against it. Whether it was revealing to me that Mark had shamelessly asked her to manage his election bid; or telling the Washington Post that, until the night Mark’s fiancée showed up onstage at his victory party in April, one of her sons had never met the woman; or just generally making it known that she is furious that he’s running, Jenny has done a masterful job of keeping her ex-husband’s past (and not-so-past) transgressions in the news. She has seeded the ground with political land mines, stood back, and waited for Mark to step on one.
The conniving ex-wife is a tired stereotype and the article headline’s bald assertion “How Savvy Jenny Sanford Sabotaged Ex-Husband Mark’s Political Comeback” is just wrong. What sabotaged Mark Sanford’s political career was his tendency to fly off to meet with another woman while still married, put out an embarrassing lie about it, and then generally face-plant into the mud on a regular basis thereafter. Jenny Sanford was collateral damage in all this, not an instigator.