NP231 range shift fork destruction

Any thoughts as to what could have caused the fork pads to disintegrate and the metal scoring in this XJ I picked up a few months ago?

The disintegrated pads had been sucked into the pickup, causing the oil to burn. I'm guessing this happened very recently since all of the other TC components are fine.

My guesses are:

• Normal wear at 220,000 miles (doesn't seem right)
• Previous owner never using 4WD for 220,000 miles
• Recent shift linkage misconfiguration, causing it to slip out of 4wd a few times in the last month, making bad grinding noise. (or the trashed pads could have caused the shifting problem)
• Bad tcase reassembly by previous owner?

I was lucky to come across this during an SYE installation.

I think this happened because previous owner installed one of the transfer case linkage rods backwards, which caused grinding in and out of 4wd.