Something that might be little known to the community and yet immensely powerful is the ability to obtain a dictionary  from the configuration sections. I will simply leave this tidbit here for anyone interested.

config = None
if file and os.path.exists(file):
    with open(file) as fp:
        config = configparser.ConfigParser()
        config.readfp(fp)
        if config:
            config = config._sections()
            for section in config:
                ordered_dict = config[section]
                config[section] = dict(ordered_dict)

I hope that helps. Cheers!