Maybe I've missed something, but couldn't you just do a split on the output of ps and go from there? That way, you don't care about whether one of the columns pushes one of the later columns out of alignment. You could even track the maxwidth of each column, then dump out the data you've collected in a more efficient, 100% aligned format.

If I were doing this, I'd keep the first row and use that as a title for all of the other rows