 Chiral conformal-gauge BRST nilpotence is on shell

In conformal gauge, let the odd left-acting BRST differential act by $sX=c^{+}{\partial }_{+}X+c^{-}{\partial }_{-}X$ and $s{c}^{\pm }=c^{\pm }{\partial }_{\pm }{c}^{\pm }$. The graded Leibniz rule gives the displayed expression for $s^{2}X$. It vanishes using the ghost equations of motion ${\partial }_{-}{c}^{+}={\partial }_{+}{c}^{-}=0$, but it is not zero for arbitrary off-shell fields. For independent Grassmann variables $\xi ,\rho$, take $c^{+}=\xi$, $c^{-}=\rho {\sigma }^{+}$ and $X={\sigma }^{-}$; then $s^{2}X=-\xi \rho \ne 0$. Each ghost itself satisfies $s^2{c}^{\pm }=0$ algebraically. With the eliminated-antighost transformation $s{b}_{\pm \pm }=i{\theta }_{\pm \pm }/{\alpha }^{\prime }$ and $s{\theta }_{\pm \pm }=0$ on the solution space, the antighosts are nilpotent too. This on-shell closure is compatible with an off-shell total-derivative variation of the gauge-fixed action. A full off-shell BRST quantization uses the complete gauge transformation and, where required, auxiliary fields rather than silently dropping mixed ghost derivatives.