Well, I wondered about that, too. So I disabled it by commenting out that line in the postbit and there was no difference. Same number of queries on the page (showing 5 posts) as when it was active.
That doesn't seem right though .... the queries don't run if the variable is commented out, do they?
Anyway, with everything else I've got going already, I figure my site's gonna blow up sometime next week ..... either way.