Visual Description: At the mountain lake cabin .
DULEE = ELUDE, NUHBC = BUNCH, SSMCOO = COSMOS, LAZETO = ZEALOT — Giving us: EDEBUNCSMEALT
Clue/Question: When something starts to smell moldy and stale, it – – –
Answer: MUST BE CLEANED
(Misty is much better than musty! So hopefully, they’ll get the cabin all cleaned up, so they can enjoy a nice misty morning the following day. Worse than a musty, moldy cabin is a any car – or truck – belonging to a heavy smoker! Those seem to take forever to air out.
All of today’s clue words were familiar old friends. Three of the jumbles appear to be new, with “dulee” having definitely been used before. It took a couple of looks to decipher “lazeto”. The answer letter layout was a wonderful thirteen letter jumble. I think it made for a fairly challenging solve. After seeing “moldy” and “stale” in the cartoon, I figured that they were dancing around musty. That helped me see MUST BE. And, from EDNCEAL I was able to come up with CLEANED.
Great cartoon of a cabin. I love a good cabin! My aunt and uncle live in a gorgeous cabin, on a pretty piece of property, that they built a little over 50 years ago. It’s a big, year round place, and it’s gorgeous. I owe them a call. Be well and do good, friends.) — YUR
Images courtesy of Google
Unclerave's Wordy Weblog 
Sunday-tough final answer, and it stumped me. I found it really hard to come up with words that could fit this grid and apply to the setup. I did find and work with BE but didn’t find MUST or CLEANED. This one’s a little odd in that there’s no pun unless as you’re suggesting MUST BE is a pun form of “musty.” But lack of a pun was not my problem; I just didn’t unscramble the words. The answer flows perfectly from clue and cartoon. If I recall correctly, years ago Jumble final answers often were more direct answers to the clue and not puns, so it’s certainly fair to do it that way. Nicely done guys.
It’s a beautiful cabin, but it should stand way up. People dream. It needs a good cleaning.
I wronged our puzzlers in not seeing the pun as well as not seeing the scrambled words in this final answer. I thought about this some more, did some online investigation, and found there is a real pun here.
MUST is used here most obviously as a(n “auxiliary”) verb, one side of the pun, but it can also be used as a noun. The first, most commonly used definition of the noun form of MUST is related to the verb form: an imperative need. The second definition of MUST is wine sediment (not applicable). But the third definition of the noun form of MUST is mold. That’s new to me, but it certainly is valid to use MUST as a synonym for “mold”… so we do have a bona fide pun here. Again: well played.
Try not to overthink these things, fellow David. I’m pretty sure the Hoyt one didn’t! LOL! — YUR