Best practice to handle an impossible value for a static variable in Java?

(This question isn't about how it can be done, but rather how it should be done.)

I'm implementing a program that creates a decision tree. There are different ways the tree can be constructed, so I have a static variable 'type' that is assigned in the main function. In the Node class constructor, I have a switch statement that checks the value of this type variable and does something accordingly.

I want to know the best way to handle the case in which the value does not match any of the preset options (the 'default' case). This should be impossible and will probably never be executed, but I want to do it right nonetheless. If this case does happen, I want it to print a message and terminate the program.

I know I can do it by simply throwing an error there and catching it the main, but it doesn't seem intuitive for something that should never happen. Is "System.exit(1)," what I need?

public class Node {
    // some attributes

    public static int type;
    public static final int TYPE1 = 0;
    public static final int TYPE2 = 1;

    public Node(**arguments**){
        // do some stuff first

        switch(this.type){
            case Node.TYPE1:
                splitType1();
                break;
            case Node.TYPE2:
                splitType2();
                break;
            default:
                // unrecognized type
                System.err.print("Error: Unrecognized type");
                System.exit(1);
        }

        // do some more stuff
    }
}