jQuery Grid Plugin - jqGrid

I'm fighting with unformat and I'm hoping someone can help. I have a column that I have added a custom formatter:

      formatter:function(cellvalue, options, rowObject) {
       return cellvalue + ' <em>(' + rowObject[2] + ')</em>';
      }

I would like to strip off the <em> work that the formatter did prior to editing so I created an unformat function:

      unformat:function(cellvalue, options) {
       var re = new RegExp("\s*<em>.*?</em>","g");
       return cellvalue.replace(re,'');
      }

The problem I am running into is that for some reason, simply specifying "unformat" causes tags to be removed from the cell data. Example, the custom formatter receives the following: cellvalue="test", rowObject[2]="09/16/2011", return value = "test <em>(09/16/2011)</em>"

If I do not specify unformat, the edit text = "test <em>(09/16/2011)</em>" -- this is expected.

Ignoring my unformat above (because it is not working do to this strang behaviour) and simply defining unformat as:

      unformat:function(cellvalue, options) {
       return cellvalue;
      }

the edit text = "test (09/16/2011)" -- ARGH! This is the same value that unformat is receiving -- thus why my regular expression stripping is not working.

Am I doing something wrong or have I found a bug?