monit (up to and including latest version 5.8.1 breaks config parsing

The issue is with monit's check file ... if changed sha1 checksum. We wouldn't have had this issue if we went with if changed md5 checksum but changing this now would result in restarting twem on all production nodes. The issue is that, when a file does not exist, monit will create an empty checksum; essentially a string of all 0s. MD5 checksums require 32 characters, but SHA1 requires 40 characters. Monit copies N characters (where N is the length of the hash) from a constant string of "0" characters. The issue is that this constant string only contains 32 x "0", so the "empty sha1" fails to validate, thus preventing monit from starting

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