Do not confuse how a date is formatted (short time) with how it is stored. If you are using an actual date data type, your field includes a date as well as the time and you want it to. Otherwise, how could you separate days? Internally dates are stored as double precision numbers with the integer portion representing the number of days since Dec 30, 1899 (for Jet/ACE, other RDBMS' use a different origin date. SQL Server uses 1/1/1900) and the decimal portion is the elapsed time since midnight and can contain significant decimal places. We use the short time format to make the time comprehensible to humans.
But, one important thing to remember - NEVER, EVER format a date/time for sorting. Always sort on the raw data field and just format for display.