I discovered this happened with MIT too, some folks that didn't submit GRE scores had their applications declined during the last mass release of results and many with high GRE scores got interview invitations. We might say it's not important and that's probably true, but some schools still use it as a filtering mechanism, especially those that receive a large number of applicants.
My guess is that Columbia is going through applications with high GRE scores first. It is also very possible that they have declined some of these candidates that are still "submitted" by now but I cannot say for certain if this is true.