You're right as long as this is an irreproducible, singular glitch.

Things to consider:

1) In old versions it was quite easy to lose friendly NPCs by luring too many
robots near them: they would eventually respawn, overwhelming the guards. Is
this impossible, or only harder to accomplish now? If enemies can respawn in
town, it would obviously be better to have all guards fully functional.

2) If it's a general pathfinding problem, it might as well have adverse effects
elswhere. What if an NPC destined to follow Tux gets stuck instead?

3) Can this also happen to Tux himself? If I got stuck, I'd edit tux_t; the
average player, however, would start over from the last save from before the
problem which hopefully exists or might angrily quit the game.