Why is LANG set to en_US.UTF-8?

[B Wooster]

On Fedora FC3, when I use ssh to connect to the machine, the display
is all garbled for single quote, double quote, and grave accent
characters.
I thought it was related to man only, so filed a bug report for groff:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=145353

But I just relalized that all text display in a ssh terminal (VT100,
VT320, etc) is messed up.

slrn, mutt, man, and I am sure all such text display programs mess up,
for example, the single quote character ends up as:
D   o   n 342 200 231   t [octal]
D   o   n 226 128 153   t [decimal]
instead of the word: Don't

I can fix this by changing LANG to be just en_US instead of
en_US.UTF-8, but why would Fedora be released with UTF-8 lang setting
if all applications break on remote access?
Do I need to worry about breaking something else if I set LANG
globally to just "en_US"?

BTW, even with en_US.UTF-8 setting, display is correct - man, slrn,
mutt all work correctly in a KDE konsole.