Articles listed in order base upon "Last-edit Date" instead of "Publishing Date"
By your description, it seems to me that there's some code in your theme implementing a views hook or a theme hook, and doing a custom ordering before rendering the results (either altering the query, or altering the results after the query). The following hooks could do that:


hook_views_pre_execute()
hook_views_post_execute()
hook_views_pre_render()


plus the theme_preprocess_views_view()

I'd suggest having a look at the theme to see if any of those is implemented, and is getting in the way.