David Reitter venit, vidit, dixit 14.08.2009 15:38:

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.

git needs to read the file because the editor could be configured there!
The only option would be to make git config -e continue past that error.

Michael