There has been a back and forth on this mobile device management site Security Update 2018-001 High Sierra or Security Update 2018-002 High Sierra | Discussion | Jamf Nation
Upshot is that downloading the stand-alone installer (which is misnamed confusingly) and running the update a second time does the trick.
Recap: For me it failed with the same error but had not actually got to the point of running the update. At this point you select the boot disk and get logged back in without updating. It seems it expects to find the distribution but can't find it because it is confused about locating the boot disk.
I would say this an important security update, numerous patches for some pretty important CVEs. And from my reading it is supplemental to 10.13.6
By the way Mojave is incompatible with my Thunderbolt drive so I'm a Mojave refugee also. :-) And the security messages can be silenced by adding the offending app to Accessibility preferences in Security. But I'm off-topic now.