The "service" script passes wrong parameters to the init
script which calls. This script should allow things like:
service sendmail status
This should execute:
/etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail status
but in fact it runs:
/etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail sendmail status
A quick fix would be:

------------Script starts here-----------
#!/bin/sh
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
        echo "no service specified" >&2
        exit 1
elif [ -x "/etc/rc.d/init.d/$1" ]; then
        X="$1"
        shift
        "/etc/rc.d/init.d/$X" $*
else
        echo "$1: unrecognized service" >&2
        exit 1
fi
---------Script ends here---------------

Note: this script was also broken -but differently- in RH
6.0