If you want a newer example, here's a very recent paper which looks at the results of a couple of RNA-Seq-papers and after being able to reproduce only 12% of the results, concludes that they all used the wrong assumptions in their statistics: http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...
Which shows that the editor really needs to know what's going on and why in each paper - I don't think every editor can know everything about his or her field.
If you want a newer example, here's a very recent paper which looks at the results of a couple of RNA-Seq-papers and after being able to reproduce only 12% of the results, concludes that they all used the wrong assumptions in their statistics: http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...
Which shows that the editor really needs to know what's going on and why in each paper - I don't think every editor can know everything about his or her field.