Piping into less and editing: "cannot edit standard input" error. Workarounds?

I recently learned that if I page my files with less, I can press v and open the buffer in Emacs. This works as long as I have the environment variable $EDITOR set up correctly, which in my case I have it as: export EDITOR='env TERM=xterm-256color emacs -nw' The above gives me the ability to load emacs within the terminal that runs less. However, the trick above does not work when **piping** commands to less. When doing this, less complains with the following message: Cannot edit standard input (press RETURN) My question is, why does this happen? But most importantly, **is there any workaround to it**?