as uid USERNAME and gid GROUPNAME not working

[forsaleinsf]

running monit 5.2.3 - downloaded today.

I am running monit as root:

address@hidden shared]# service monit start
Starting monit: Starting monit daemon
                                                           [  OK  ]
address@hidden shared]# ps -ef | grep monit
root     32390     1  0 14:38 ?        00:00:00 /usr/local/monit_523/bin/monit

my file in /etc/monit.d/ is :

check process resque with pidfile /var/tmp/resque.pid
    start program = "/data/apps/smp/shared/start-resque" as uid deploy and gid 
deploy
    stop program = "/bin/kill -9 `cat /var/tmp/resque.pid`"

if i run the command on the cli as the deploy user everything works well.

in the manual i read monit would ignore the as uid and gid option if monit was 
not run by root - this seems like what monit is doing, even though it being run 
by root.

has anyone seen this?