An Air Force basic training instructor facing 22 years in prison was given 21/2 years Thursday after he was found guilty on all but one of nine charges that included a 2011 tryst with a recruit.

Staff Sgt. Craig LeBlanc, 27, was the eighth trainer to be tried for sexual misconduct at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland in an ongoing scandal, which has become the largest ever in the Air Force.

So far, 32 instructors have been charged with having illicit contact with 62 recruits and technical training students.

Prosecutors branded him a bad apple who was so rotten, he used his status as a trainer as a pickup line outside a San Antonio bar.

They said LeBlanc repeatedly broke the law and had turned his back on the Air Force's core values of integrity, service before self and excellence. Instead, he embraced dishonor, self over service and crime.

He didn't deny the portrayal.

“Before I went into confinement, I was very unhealthy. I had a lot of issues that had not been addressed by me,” LeBlanc said, adding that people from his parents to his fiancee warned he had things to work on. “I didn't want to confront my issues. I wanted to run from them.”

Facing a battery of allegations that included sexually assaulting a woman, he was at risk of going to prison for 52 years.

Only one of the other trainers who've gone to trial is to spend more time behind bars. Staff Sgt. Luis Walker, convicted of raping one recruit and illicit involvement with nine others, got 20 years last summer.

Col. Donald Eller Jr., the Air Force judge deciding the case, found LeBlanc not guilty of sexual assault, the most serious of all the charges because it carried a possible 30-year maximum sentence and would have branded him a sex offender.

Prosecutors asked Eller to send LeBlanc to prison for five years, far less than the maximum. The judge reduced him to the lowest rank, airman, and ordered that he receive a dishonorable discharge.

By his own measure, LeBlanc's life had spiraled out of control.

Carefully selected to hold the job of training recruits, he later abused them, helped lure two women into a dimly lit supply room where they had sex with another instructor, cheated on his wife and threatened to jump from a Loop 410 overpass just after Thanksgiving.

Jailed after that, he illegally contacted his fiancee on Christmas Eve even though he was forbidden from doing so, and also was given a letter of reprimand for trying to pick up a technician who was providing treatment for him.

“I did not hold up the standard of an Air Force NCO or to the higher standard of an MTI,” he told the court in a sworn statement.

Lt. Col. Shawn Speranza described LeBlanc's many misdeeds, including forcing recruits to eat cookies, committing adultery, having sex and an unprofessional relationship with the recruit, and asking her to lie about it to investigators.

Those incidents ran from August 2011 through February.

LeBlanc also went AWOL after being arrested for public drunkenness on a Memorial Day river trip and lied to an NCO about why he didn't make it to work the next day.

A few months later, he struck up a conversation with a woman at a bar and met her again in the parking lot at closing time.

“He asked me what I'd do if he was a bad apple,” she recalled.

The woman, an airman in technical training at Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, reported the incident.

LeBlanc later told an officer at a confinement hearing that he didn't know the woman was in training.

Both LeBlanc and Staff Sgt. Kwinton Estacio, another instructor in the 331st Training Squadron, were charged with sexually assaulting two women in a dimly lit supply room the weekend after they graduated from basic training.

Estacio, too, was acquitted of sexual assault but is doing a year in a California brig for obstruction of justice, violating a no-contact order and having an unprofessional relationship.

The Air Force said LeBlanc used his position and the omnipresent threat of holding recruits back for more training to extract sexual favors from the woman in the supply room.

However, his lawyers agued the law requires a specific threat to physically harm a victim or hurt their career.

No evidence was presented to show LeBlanc ever did that, but in calling for a five-year sentence Speranza, the prosecutor, called him “rotten to the core” — a characterization disputed by the defense.

One-time Army prosecutor Joseph Jordan, pointed to his client as a father of two sons and a daughter who “admittedly made some mistakes.”

LeBlanc said he had tunnel vision and “didn't see the big picture.”

Life in jail has changed that, he said, telling the court while sobbing that his grandmother has been diagnosed with cancer, “and I'm not there to console her or my mother.” His mother, a few feet away, cried.