I made a mistake editing my config file using "git config -e".  This  
caused git commands to fail.

Trying to fix the problem, I did

git config -e
fatal: bad config file line 7 in .git/config

I think the refusal to edit a broken config file is not a good idea.   
It's easy to fix for me of course by editing .git/config directly, but  
git-config should probably not read the config file at all.

Thanks for your consideration.