I often paste verbatim text into the lab notebook I keep with org-mode. Org-mode always interprets any line that begins with an asterisk as a headline, even when the line is surrounded by #+BEGIN_... and #+END_... patterns. This breaks org-special-edit, making it complain, "No special environment to edit here", unless I manually insert another character at the beginning of every line in the block that begins with an asterisk.
The behavior surprised me. I found two ways to work around it. First, I can edit the would-be verbatim text as described above. It will always look like the original text in org-special-edit. That's marginally acceptable because it alters my original text and makes me take one more step before I can copy and paste it elsewhere. Second, I can put such text in a drawer. I discovered that org-mode does not mis-interpret my text in a drawer.
Here is an example. It's markdown text. I use #+{BEGIN,END}_EXAMPLE but this behavior occurs in all of the #+BEGIN_.. and #+END_... patterns.
#+BEGIN_EXAMPLE
This is the README.md for rfc-tools, a collection of programs for
processing IETF RFCs.
* fetch-rfcs-by-title.sh downloads into the current directory the RFCs
whose titles contain the string given on the command line. Uses an
rfc-index file in the current directory. Prefers the PDF version of
RFCs but will obtain the text version if the PDF is not available.
* fetch-sip-rfcs.sh downloads RFCs that contain "Session Initiation"
in their titles into the current directory.
* search-rfc-index.sh searches an rfc-index file in the current
directory for the string given on the command line. The string can
contain spaces.
* join-titles.awk turns the contents of an rfc-index file into a
series of long lines. Each line begins with the RFC number, then a
space, then the rest of the entry from the rfc-index.
#+END_EXAMPLE