You can leave it as drawing triangle strips, but set glPolygonMode(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_LINE); to get wire-frame triangles.
I do that with my terrain and it kills the performance. I haven't thought about why as there isn't much overwrie on my terrain (about 0 triangles mapping ot the same pixel to make overdraw). I assume that the polygonMode stll runs the pixel shader on all triangles pixels and not just the edges, but then later discards writing in depth/color for the non edge pixels. Only explanation I can think of off the top of my head. Goes from like 150FPS to 20 or something. so the inner triangle pixels would be overwritten a TON of times in my case.