Text Box linking gone crazy

Here's my problem. I was given a template by a customer with all the front matter filled in and I will drop in all the text and graphics. It's setup with Primary Text Frames on and smart text reflow set to on in the prefs.

I have parent pages with two columns per page in the spread. Each text box is linked to the next sequentially (1,2,3,4) and they appear linked when I show text links. The problem I'm having is as soon as I create new spreads and place text into them the linking go to 1,2,3,+1,4) Thus on import it drops the columns into the next page and then jumps back to the in this crazy order. Then the same text block gets linked to two or more text blocks and so on.

I've tried this on new layouts and I get the same thing happening. I'm running the latest InDesign as per Creative Cloud and the source files are rtf and docx directly from word.

I need help, I'm Stumped.