Although I'm not as familiar with this code as I would like, it makes me slightly nervous that we actually need to do this here -- considering this function is solely used upon creating a new pending version, which leads me to believe that at some point we should have prevented this from happening or handled it accordingly in the last pending state. I believe this should be handled as sage mentioned above unless I'm missing something.

It looks like we're dealing with this here to fix something that shouldn't be happening.  Otherwise, I would like to have a more detailed description on why this is needed in the commit message.