I commented it out in email_html.tpl and email_text.tpl. But now that I look at it, I really didn't.

More testing......
Confirm that you are using HTML COMMENTS, rather than PHP COMMENTS.
There are several different ways to add comment lines (also called, "comment-out") in different file types.
HTML: Comment tags <!-- and --> are often used to insert comments in HTML.
PHP: Preceding a the line with // is often used to comment-out single lines in PHP.
The majority of the content within the template files are HTML based. The section posted above is an HTML section.
Also, since your emails are being generated by this template, you probably should just remove those lines that you don't want displayed from the template file completely, rather than having the commented-out section that you do NOT want in your emails, to be inserted in to the email, but just hidden.