An attacker wants to decrypt the packets passed on as the man in the middle without alerting the victim. A big red "insecure connection" browser warning due to an untrusted certificate used by the MITM can easily thwart the attack.
To make this work, the attacker needs access to a CA the victim trusts to sign certificates on the fly. If the attack is limited to a single target page, stealing the associated private key from the legitimate website operator is an option, too.