possible usability issue in rebase -i?

I recently came over a not-overly-helpful error in git rebase -i, when a line got wrapped by the editor so that a part of the commit-message was interpreted as a command:

--- $ git rebase -i HEAD~20 <edit file> Unknown command: . fatal: ambiguous argument 'Please fix this in the file C:/msysgit/git/.git/rebas e-merge/git-rebase-todo.': unknown revision or path not in the working tree. Use '--' to separate paths from revisions fatal: Not a valid object name Please fix this in the file C:/msysgit/git/.git/r ebase-merge/git-rebase-todo. fatal: bad revision 'Please fix this in the file C:/msysgit/git/.git/rebase-merg e/git-rebase-todo.'

$ git --version git version 1.6.5.1386.g43a7a.dirty ---

In this particular case, the first character on the new line was '.', so the first line of the error message makes perfect sense, but the lines that followed the real error got me pretty confused. Perhaps this is something that could be cleaned away? I'd think that an unknown command always should be fatal, and not need to propagate further. But I might be wrong, as I'm not familiar with the inner workings of rebase -i.