config.sub and config.guess | .diff.gz bloat

[Zenaan Harkness <zen@iptaustralia.net>]

debhelper puts the following into the "clean" rule in debian/rules:

ifneq "$(wildcard /usr/share/misc/config.sub)" ""
	cp -f /usr/share/misc/config.sub config.sub
endif
ifneq "$(wildcard /usr/share/misc/config.guess)" ""
	cp -f /usr/share/misc/config.guess config.guess
endif

Three questions:
- why are these two files copied in?
- are they necessary for the build of the program I am packaging?
- they make my .diff.gz file twice their otherwise size; can I delete
that entry from my rules file altogether, or otherwise remove them from
the output?

tia
zen