default editor

[you@aredumb.com (Will Yardley)]

[ Tried to post to linux.debian.user, but apparently this doesn't work
at the moment, unfortunately. ]

I noticed that when I have /usr/bin/editor set to nano on a system, but
I have:
export VISUAL=vim
in my environment, mutt still seems to use nano as the editor; however
if I put:
export EDITOR=vim
as well, mutt will use vim (or nvi, or whatever I set). Shouldn't VISUAL
(if present) override /usr/bin/editor as the default full-screen editor?
That's been my experience in the past (with crontab -e, for example); is
this a bug in the mutt package?