February 29, 2008 — The “other man” who helped destroy a marriage on national TV - getting his ex to admit to 8 million viewers that she’d rather be married to him than her hubby - is “sick” over his role in the scandal and says he made a mistake appearing on the show.

“I really just want all of this to be over,” Frank Nardi Jr. wrote in an e-mail to The Post yesterday about his stomach-churning appearance on the lie-detector reality show “Moment of Truth” Monday.

The fledgling New York actor, who goes by the online nickname “Nardiballs,” also wrote on his MySpace.com page yesterday: “This whole experience was a mistake . . . I haven’t been this sick ever in my life.

“It wasn’t my intention to go out and ruin a marriage.”

But that’s what happened when Nardi, 25, turned up as a surprise guest on the controversial Fox show where his one-time gal pal, Lauren Cleri, 26, made viewers squirm after admitting she’d cheated on her husband.

She then dropped a stunner, confessing she wishes she’d married Nardi instead of her hubby of two years, NYPD rookie cop Frank Cleri, 24.

“I thought it was gonna be fun when the producers from the show invited me out to LA,” Nardi wrote on his blog.

“Quite the contrary . . . It was supposed to be a surprise, a good surprise, but unfortunately it backfired right in my face.”

“As we all know the show was nuts,” added Nardi, who has been labeled on several TV message boards as a homewrecker.

I’m sorry I ever did it.”

Before his small-screen debut, Nardi - who has appeared in the Philadelphia production of the off-Broadway hit “Tony & Tina’s Wedding” and attends acting classes at Manhattan’s William Esper Studio - touted his prime-time appearance to his online friends, and urged them to watch the show.

Lauren Cleri, a New York salon worker and aspiring actress, and Nardi were classmates at New Jersey’s Pennsauken HS, where he was president of the drama club.

They dated before she wed Cleri in 2006.

As the cameras rolled and a visibly shaken Frank Cleri cringed, Nardi boldly asked Lauren: “Do you believe I am the man you should be married to?”

She answered “yes” - and racked up $100,000 when the lie-detector results said she was telling the truth, but wound up with nothing when the machine rejected her answer that she was a good person.

This week’s episode of Rock of Love begs the question: why watch the Oscars when you can watch Megan and her low-rise jeans wrestle a greased pig?

It’s morning in the House of Ill Repute, and Bret personally wakes up the girls, which judging by their unschelacked faces, they’re not thrilled about. Ambre’s knees are still all scabby from playing football in the mud and who knows what else. Big John appears downstairs once they’ve gathered and tells the girls to “saddle up.” The braintrust figures out that their next challenge will involve horses. Catherine, a/k/a Grandma, a/k/a Elvira, tells us that she’s “barrel raced her whole life,” so she is very excited at the prospect of actually winning a challenge for once.

At what must be a rodeo ring, Bret introduces his special guest judge. It’s Rodeo from Rock of Love I. She is described as being “a lady of stature and insanity.” And she has a super annoying laugh. Luckily she really doesn’t appear again. As per usual, the MVP of the relay that will ensue gets a solo date with Bret, while the other winning team members get a group date. The relay involves lassos, barrels and bandana-wearing greased pigs. Why must we humiliate these poor pigs by forcing them to dress like King D-bag himself?

Just a few weeks before the return of “The Hills,” MTV is giving fans a sneak peek at the hit reality series’ eight upcoming bonus episodes.

The episodes, which start airing March 24, will begin with co-stars Lauren Conrad and Whitney Port’s trip to Paris, where they travel to work for Teen Vogue. The new episodes also will continue the L.A.-based story line featuring couple Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt.

“Hills” star Lauren Conrad announced that MTV was ordering eight additional episodes of the show during its live third-season finale December 11. That episode averaged 4.7 million total viewers, according to Nielsen.

The first oddity (but certainly not the last) about the eight-week Oprah Winfrey infomercial “Oprah’s Big Give” is that there is nary a single genuine giving moment to be found during the opening hour.

It is instead a profoundly hyperkinetic and unwieldy adventure in product placement, in Oprah-as-Messiah hype and, ultimately, in what’s so utterly fake and insidious about “reality” television itself.

Because the ABC series operates under the high-minded guise of bringing life, rescue and joy to people in need, it’s actually even more disturbing than those shows claiming no similarly socially redeeming purpose.

While the recipients of this largesse no doubt truly benefit in a format that’s one part “Queen for a Day” and one part “The Amazing Race,” the question must be asked early on: Is it worth being exploited as a quasi-pathetic charity case on national television, replete with on-cue manipulative sappy music and photo ops choreographed by editors seemingly in the throes of epileptic seizure, to gain that helping hand?

The idea here is that, armed simply with a photo, directions and $2,500 in cash, 10 selfless soldiers — including an Iraq War vet, a dot-com millionaire, a paraplegic author and a pre-med student — must change the lives of their needy assigned human/family in five days through fundraising, corporate sponsorship or just plain love (which in this case is another synonym for cold hard cash).

The “Biggest Giver” will wind up with $1 million, though Oprah insists “that’s a secret!” Oh really? These people are taking weeks out of their busy lives just to help their fellow man?

What makes “Oprah’s Big Give” especially unwatchable is a vertigo-inducing pace. Few shots last more than three seconds, making it virtually impossible to get to know any of these people on anything more than a surface level. Which is probably as it should be.

Shallow as a birdbath, the program would appear to exist less as a true philanthropic exercise than yet another self-aggrandizing vehicle in Oprah’s divine quest to become synonymous with all that is virtuous and good on Earth. We might well refer to this as “Touched By a Talk Show Host.”

Here are a few quick thoughts on last night’s “Project Runway” (and don’t read on if you haven’t seen the episode).